AMSBIO launches new screening company

GLASGOW, U.K.—July 4 saw the announcement of a new company, ScreenIn3D, which is a joint venture set up by AMSBIO and the University of Strathclyde exploiting the latest advances in microfluidics and 3D culture to develop a novel microfluidic screening platform.

The unique combination of microfluidic lab-on-a-chip technology with physiologically relevant 3D spheroids is designed to make drug discovery more closely relevant with what happens in the body, explains AMSBIO, and the ability to “micro-size” drug-cell interactions reportedly will allow pharmaceutical and biotech companies do at least a hundred times more testing for the same money spent now—as well as increasing productivity, as it enables more experiments to be done on the same platform at the same time.

The first application platform launched by ScreenIn3D, the OncoScreen service, is targeted at improving anticancer drug treatment and accelerating development of new personalized medicine solutions using patient-derived tissue.

Chosen by the Society for Laboration Automation & Screening (at the SLAS Europe 2018 meeting) as an exciting innovation technology company, the OncoScreen service gives users the ability to reduce and replace animal models in cancer research. As well as offering the aforementioned hundredfold greater throughput than existing cancer screening assays for the same cost, OncoScreen also provides a larger screening capability of patient-derived tissue than any existing services, according to AMSBIO.

“The OncoScreen platform presents exciting possibilities for testing patient-derived multicellular tumor spheroids/organoids (comprising cancer cells, stromal cells, cancer stem cells and/or immune cells) for disease/biomarker-oriented drug activity and profiling using single- and pair-wise standard/targeted drug combinations,” said Alex Sim, managing director of AMSBIO and ScreenIn3D. “We are actively seeking partners and investors to fast-track development of further platforms. Additional R&D grants to enhance our immunotherapy and neuroscience programs are being applied for with our collaborators.”