Accelerating Technology Design & Adoption via an Ecosystem and Community Of Collaborators

Working Together to Emulate Human Biology & Change an Industry

Drug development is too expensive, takes too long, and many drug candidates that show promise in preclinical trials end up failing because animal testing methods don’t predict how the drug will work in humans. Animal testing has been the standard for over 100 years - over 100 millions animals are used each year in scientific research.

Replacing this legacy animal testing standard with a new technology that everyone accepts, would take an enormous effort from many different stakeholders - no one company alone could develop a solution and then try and sell it. Creating the new technology would take close collaboration, R&D input, and validation from the ecosystem of users that would eventually adopt a platform as the new standard - from drug developers, to academic researchers, clinical research organizations, healthcare providers, and government regulators.

“Working together in a collaborative environment to create a more accurate and validated technology is the way that a disruptive technology can have impact on human health. In order to make a technology truly revolutionary in our field, we must rethink the way technology platforms are designed and share data to help achieve a shared vision. By adopting the concept of a platform that embodies the collective input of many stakeholders—where the users enrich and validate the system—we will learn and achieve much more together than we ever would apart.”

The great hope for replacing animal testing with a new human-centric technology platform is the Organs-on-Chips technology, invented at Harvard’s Wyss Institute. The early academic lab technology was hard to use, had limited scientific data validation, and was hand-made in small volumes - the challenge was how to democratize the concept into an easy-to-use system that could be used in every lab across the world. It would require cooperation from across the scientific community.

Lewis worked with the technology’s founding team to create an open design philosophy based on community participation and a shared vision, with platform development & data validation conducted by a comprehensive network of R&D partners and collaborators. This included close collaboration from the community at all phases of development, from requirements gathering, to early R&D, rapid prototyping, to beta testing, continual feedback, and iterations. Effectively, the design & validation of the new technology was conducted by a broad ecosystem of future users.

Working together to take-on a major global challenge is the way to succeed, and the vision for how it was done is captured in the Xconomy article below. Storytelling of the strategic vision and the OpEd writing was led by Lewis and his team on behalf of Emulate’s CEO.

Xconomy OpEd:
Unconventional Partners, Like FDA, Can Drive Adoption of New Tech

Strategic collaborative partnerships to develop & validate the new technology included:

> DARPA: Wyss Institute to Receive up to $37 Million from DARPA to Mimic the Human Body

> FDA: FDA Signs Collaborative Agreement with Emulate, Inc. to Use Organs-on-Chips

> AstraZeneca: Emulate, Inc. and AstraZeneca Form Strategic Agreement to Work Side-by-Side

> Roche: Scientists from Emulate and Roche form innovative partnership to use Organ-Chips

> Takeda: Emulate and Takeda Partner to Use Intestine-Chip for New Drug Target Identification

> NIH: Emulate, Inc. Awarded Grant to Fund Use of Human Emulation System aboard the ISS

> M.J. Fox Foundation: Emulate Awarded Grant to Investigate Treatment of Parkinson’s Disease

> Covance: Emulate Announces Strategic Collaboration with Covance for Drug Evaluation

> Cedars-Sinai: Cedars-Sinai and Emulate Advance Precision Medicine With Organs-on-Chips

> J&J: Emulate Announces Strategic Collaboration with Johnson & Johnson Innovation

> USC: Emulate Announces Translational R&D Collaboration with Lawrence J. Ellison Institute