Why HemoShear?

Pharmaceutical companies already have multiple tools that are routinely used in their drug discovery efforts, but HemoShear’s technology, when combined with the scientific expertise at HemoShear, has three major advantages over other in-vitro systems:

Accurate recreation of human (or animal) hemodynamics and biology

Many micro fluidic systems flow or perfuse medium across a cell culture on a plate or chip. Some even "pulse" the flow in an effort to mimic arterial blood flow. This is an improvement over static cell cultures, but still has shortcomings when trying to recreate response that accurately reflects the response in a living animal or human. Only HemoShear’s system actually recreates region-specific human or animal cell phenotypes. In a human or animal, blood in most of the circulation does not flow evenly in one direction with constant force, nor does it pulse in a consistent manner. Blood moves and pulses with varying force, and may even "pool" or circle in some parts of the vascular system. The resulting shear forces are of fundamental importance for recreating accurate region-specific cell phenotypes. HemoShear’s system uses primary human vascular cells together with actual human hemodynamic patterns, captured from MRI studies, to recreate the exact shear forces present in the organ system under study (e.g. large artery), thus providing more reliable and predictive results. HemoShear is the only company which has taken this approach to recreating human biology on the bench top, and HemoShear owns the patent on this comprehensive system.

The ability to independently analyze the outputs from each cell-type in a multi-cell culture

A common drawback to current multi-cellular or 3D culture systems is the inability to separate out each type of cell in the culture and study the responses of that cell-type independently. The HemoShear technology allows for independent collection of each cell-type and the by-products (e.g. secreted factors) produced by each cell-type in order to fully elucidate what is happening with each cell-type. This means customers can independently analyze genes, proteins, and secreted factors for each cell- type, and can perform functional assays and high content screening for each cell-type independently as well.

Broad flexibility in designing experiments using the HemoShear technology

The HemoShear technology is, in every sense of the work, a platform technology that has broad application across the drug discovery process. It can be used to recreate human or animal systems; to study multiple organ systems within humans or animals (e.g., large vessel, small vessel, liver); and in healthy or disease-prone states (e.g., hypertensive, atherosclerotic, diabetic). Furthermore, the experimental inputs and conditions can be altered (for example, to study a specific sub-population) and the outputs can be analyzed separately enabling rich sample collection of genes, proteins, secreted factors, functional assays, and high content screening. The system can be used to study small or large molecule compounds (e.g. biologics). The incredible flexibility of the HemoShear technology means that, unlike other technologies that have limited application in drug discovery, the HemoShear technology can be applied to answer scientific questions across almost the entire spectrum of drug discovery efforts, whether the need is:

  • identifying and validating targets and pathways of disease progression
  • evaluating and selecting optimal new drug candidates
  • identifying and understanding adverse and off-target effects
  • re-evaluating existing compounds for new claims or new indications
  • understanding the relevance of results seen in animals compared with human results

In addition to these key advantages of the technology, HemoShear customer’s gain access to scientists with expertise across a broad number of areas. The HemoShear scientific team becomes an extension of our customer's research organization, working side-by-side to further their drug discovery and development efforts.