19.11.2021 17:30

TToP: a replica of human tissues to develop new drugs

The innovative cell culture system wins the StartCup Lombardia 2021

The innovative cell culture system developed within the TToP (True Tissue on Platform) project was among the winners of the latest edition of StartCup Lombardia in the Life Science & Medtech category, winning a prize of € 25,000 and the chance to join the PNI (National Innovation Award) competition.

Promoted by Regione Lombardia with the coordination of PoliHub, StartCup Lombardia is a competition organized by local universities and university incubators to encourage the birth of new high-potential businesses.

The premise of the research is that in vitro preclinical studies and animal testing often fail to predict drug safety and efficacy, due to their limited mimicking of the human physiological environment.

TToP: True Tissue on Platform is a low-cost, highly scalable and user-friendly technological solution, capable of replicating the physiology of the human body, thus improving the efficiency of the development process of new drugs while minimizing the use of animal models.

Its main features are:

• the possibility to host different structures inside a retrievable cartridge (e.g., microporous membranes, 3D scaffolds, tissue biopsies);
• the ability to enable bicompartmental cultures;
• the optical accessibility to both sides of the hosted structure;
• the possibility to retrieve in a controlled manner the biological sample and to reuse it for further analysis or other experiments.

Already winner of the Switch2Product competition, TToP was developed in the ATTiC Lab of the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering by Lorenzo Coppadoro, Gianfranco Beniamino Fiore and Monica Soncini. The team also includes Maria Lombardi and Chiara Foglieni of the San Raffele Hospital in Milan, who support the project and cooperate in evaluating the device effectiveness.

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