During the drug discovery process, researchers have the need to screen a relatively large number of drug compounds to gain insights into drug efficacy and safety and eliminate ineffective or toxic compounds. However current two-dimensional (2D) cell culture-based and three-dimensional (3D) cell aggregate-driven drug screening approaches do not provide cells with the necessary microenvironmental cues to recapitulate human patient drug response, leading to costly failures during in vivo preclinical studies or clinical studies. Therefore, a need arises for more physiologically relevant drug screening models in a low-cost and high-throughput paradigm.
VivoSphere’s mission is to develop safer and more effective therapeutics with cutting-edge tissue engineering technology. Our VivoSphere technology products utilize a tissue engineering toolset to build more pathophysiological human disease models. Our 3D hydrogel scaffold provides a more physiologically relevant microenvironment for cell growth and drug response, while the spheroidal geometry eliminates barriers to adoption by leveraging existing equipment and assays already established for aggregated tissues. Most importantly, the VivoSpheres are produced with our patented “microfluidic cell encapsulation platform” which leads to high production rate and consistency, which are key for use in high-throughput screening (HTS). VivoSpheres containing different cell types have been successfully produced to be used in various applications, including injectable cell delivery for regenerative medicine, stem cell-based cardiac tissue production, and cancer disease modeling.