Many diseases such as mumps, measles, and polio have nearly been eradicated in the United States and many other countries, thanks to the development of breakthrough drugs and vaccines. Today’s medical news is filled with stories about new treatments on the market, such as Merck’s vaccine for cervical cancer, Gardasil, and about the research going on to find drugs to treat bird flu or new strains of influenza. Nevertheless, the process of drug and vaccine discovery and testing remains time-consuming and costly, requiring up to 12 years and $900 million to bring a drug to market. A primary reason for this immense cost is the inefficient early-phase testing on living cells in the laboratory (in vitro), before drugs or vaccines can be tested in animals or humans. The lack of a tissue culture assay that quantitatively measures and reliably predicts the body’s response to candidate drugs and vaccines is a challenge for the pharmaceutical industry.
Associate Professor Nick Kotov and two of his graduate students, Meghan Cuddihy (chemical engineering) and Jungwoo Lee (biomedical engineering), have designed a solution aimed at accelerating the discovery and development of new medicines, improving the quality of human life and saving pharmaceutical and biotech companies millions of dollars in development costs. Their solution, Perfecta3D, is a novel, highly ordered and consistent 3D substrate combined with a standard well-plate. The 3D substrate in each well of the well-plate can regenerate the specific tissue-like cellular microenvironment of an individual animal or human body. This is a significant improvement over current testing technology, which grows cells in only two dimensions, because Perfecta3D can more accurately reflect how drugs react in the body. In this consistent 3D environment, high quality and high throughput in vitro cellular assay results, particularly for toxicity and efficacy testing, will deliver significant and supporting information about new drug candidate materials prior to in vivo clinical testing.
The development of Perfecta3D has generated quite a buzz. The team, along with two MBA students from the University’s Ross School of Business, formed a company named Trifecta Biomatrix, and have had great success. This winter, the team was awarded a Dare to Dream Assessment Grant from the Zell Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies at the Ross School. This grant is awarded to students to assess the commercial feasibility of a business concept for an innovative business with high-growth potential. They followed their success at Michigan by winning third prize at the BR Ventures Business Idea Competition at the Johnson School of Business at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. The semester culminated triumphantly when the team captured the grand prize in the Entrepreneurial Challenge at the 2006 Materials Research Society Meeting in San Francisco, CA. More recently, Trifecta Biomatrix has been meeting with venture capitalists and experienced entrepreneurs to get advice about developing their discovery into a viable business.
Article from the 2006 Chemical Engineering Newsletter.