Technology Sponsor
Altis Biosystems has developed a patent-pending stem cell platform that recreates the human intestinal epithelium, in a high-throughput format, for drug screening and microbiome research. Stem cells are sourced from transplant-grade donor intestine. Altis provides a variety of services for customers and also sells the platform as a kit, which can be shipped to the customer. Services include Inflammation, Barrier Function, Toxicology, and Drug Disposition. Our goal is to reduce the time and cost of drug development with a platform that more accurately reflects native human biology and reduce the need for animal testing.
Altis Biosystems was founded to address the biopharmaceutical industry’s intense need for more accurate drug screening methods, using in vitro platforms, which can more closely replicate human biology. The inadequacies of current drug development methods, prior to human testing, have left the industry with an unacceptable 88% failure rate in clinical trials and $151B spent every year on research and development. A key factor driving this dismal failure rate is the use of Caco-2 cells (cancer cells) and animal testing, which are an essential part of preclinical drug development, and cannot predict human results.
Capitalizing on research on growing organoids from human intestines, Altis has developed a
next-generation intestinal platform for in vitro testing during drug development. The platform
produces a layer of human intestinal stem and differentiated cells — either of the large or small
intestine — that can be used for compound screening, disease modeling, and microbiome research.
RepliGut™
tissue constructs are polarized monolayers that express tight junction proteins and can be tailored to
include stem/progenitor cells, differentiated cells, or both, representing all major cell lineages in
physiologic ratios. Each tissue sample on the RepliGut™ kit features a patent-pending biomimetic
scaffold that separates RepliGut™ cells from the cassette’s porous membrane and allows cells to
survive for a prolonged period of time. Luminal and basal reservoirs allow compounds and additional
cell types to interact with the epithelial cells for side-specific assays.
In the near
term, Altis has much interesting work ahead of them as the company adds other types of tissues and
features to the RepliGut™ human tissue model for the large and small intestines. Altis’s hope is to
eventually supplant old tumor cell (Caco-2) models with models like our RepliGut™ platform that more
accurately reflect what occurs in the human body, enabling more efficient and accurate drug discovery
and development.
