Lucero joins Vinnova-backed Nanoscale Drug Testing consortium alongside AstraZeneca, Pelago Bioscience, Karolinska Institute, and KTH.
The academic-industry consortium is coordinated by SciLifeLab and aims to develop a “near-patient” drug development platform based on highly miniaturized 3D cell models comprised of patient-derived cells.
Testing with patient models at a scale and cost where it can support broader testing of efficacy and safety has the potential to significantly reduce clinical failures. When established, the aim is that the platform will allow the development of effective and cost-effective treatments and help match candidate drugs with the right patient subgroup through functional testing.
“AstraZeneca has a strong interest in highly miniaturised disease-relevant cell models, where efficacy and safety in response to treatment can be routinely assessed. One of our approaches for enabling this is through the Nanoscale Drug Testing collaboration, which offers an innovative technical solution for solving this challenge at a scale where it has the potential to replace simpler screening models,” says Dr. Thomas Lundbäck, Director at Mechanistic and Structural Biology, Discovery Sciences, R&D, AstraZeneca.
Lucero’s platform, which will be utilised in the Nanoscale Drug Testing collaboration, aims to solve technical challenges around the miniaturization of the test system to nanoscale format, as required for cost-effective implementation throughout the drug discovery value chain.
As a next step, work is being done to place members of Lucero’s R&D team so they can closely interact with the fully automated drug discovery operations at the AstraZeneca R&D Centre in Gothenburg, Sweden.
Read more about the Nanoscale Drug Testing consortium.
