Ayla Annac CEO/President and Co-Founder of InvivoSciences Inc. (IVS) is honored and pleased to announce the exciting news that will allow the company to bring another critical technology development project to Wisconsin. InvivoSciences has received a new National Institutes of Health SBIR Fast Track award, lead by Dr. Tetsuro Wakatsuki as the Principal Investigator. The funding will support the development of IVS’s novel platform for safer, predictive and cost-effective drug-development process. We are grateful to both Senator Tammy Baldwin and Congressman Mark Pocan for their support and belief in our team’s technology development capabilities, and importance of the projects we have undertaken in Wisconsin. We also thank BioPrime’s Dr. Lenka Fedorkova for her expert business advice and help with the proposal preparation.
IVS will collaborate with three expert, world renown researchers at prestigious institutions to tackle a significant challenge in today’s pharmaceutical industry: nearly 45% of drugs withdrawn from the market (1975 – 2007) were eliminated due to cardiac safety concerns. A better, more predictive and effective safety assessment approach is needed that will reduce animal use and costs in order to improve the productivity of the pharmaceutical industry. IVS’ technology solution combines computational and experimental analyses of cardiac safety parameters using adult heart slices isolated from donor heart tissue and its induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) derived heart muscle constructs, NuHeart™, to build a much more predictive and cost-effective cardiac safety assessment system. While the access to donor’s hearts is limited, a successfully validated system enables drug developers to accurately predict a new drug’s cardiac safety profile by running cost-effective experiments using InvivoSciences’s iPSC-derived micro human NuHeart™ that are accessible to all drug developers and the research community. Using artificial intelligence (AI) and our unique approach, the study should generate unprecedented data that will predict accurately cardiac safety concerns of individuals at any age and gender, and thus allowing us to address questions such as individual differences in cardiac electrophysiology and susceptibility to drug-induced arrhythmia.
It is exciting to be part of such critical technology development that has the potential to save pharmaceutical industry millions of dollars during clinical trails, avoid costly screening panels and ultimately enable the development of drugs with fever cardio-toxicity side effects for millions of patients at any age and gender.
IVS is developing additional applications of the predictive drug assessment system and is actively pursuing outside investment to support the development of its technology pipeline. Questions or requests for more information can be directed to Ayla Annac, MBA at [email protected].