MP: Vitroscope - nationalising the patent & design for production and market entry.

The drug development process is an extremely complex procedure: promising chemical compounds that come out of research are tested on cells in a laboratory, before being tested on animals, and finally on humans. This process also has a growing problem: in average it now takes 14 years and costs US$ 2'000'000'000 to get a new drug on the market. Costs that are ultimately paid for by the patients or the healthcare system. One of the main reasons for this is that despite the fantastic progress of our understanding of the human body, it is still incredibly difficult to predict in a laboratory whether or not a drug will actually help a real patient. What Vitroscope is working on is to improve this prediction accuracy: currently, tests in the laboratory are almost exclusively done in a static environment, meaning that cells are researched in a resting condition within various containers. This is in sharp contrast to what cells experience in a living human, where all cells constantly experience stimuli through various types of mechanical stress. Experiments have proven that this an extremely important factor for how cells work, and subsequently how they react and interact with chemical compounds - like drugs. Although there are systems on the market that enable mechanical stimuli, they are generally very time consuming and complex to set up. Based on a PhD work at NTNU and an intensive collaboration with researchers with the University of Zurich, we developed a device that makes it extremely easy and efficient to accurately expose cells to shear stress as cells experience it in the human body. With this project we were able to secure crucial IP and bring the design to a level where we can commercialise our product so that researchers around the world can start observing cells under more realistic conditions.

This project had two main goals: securing IP, and improving the product design with a focus on implementing the feedback of early test users, as well as getting the device ready for production. IP: Vitroscope nationalized the patent in key markets around the world (EU, US, CA, KR, SG, AU, CN, JP). This is a crucial achievement in order to build the company further. Product: as part of this project, Vitroscope received help from experienced consultants to streamline the path to the market. As a result, we implemented key feedback from the test users into the design and sourced suppliers of materials and sub-assemblies. Consequently, the product is significantly easier to use and significantly more efficient to manufacture, all the while being more robust.