Partnerships

HemoShear engages in strategic research partnerships with drug development companies to unmask new targets and accelerate development of innovative new drug compounds. Utilizing our proprietary platform technology and scientific expertise, we develop human cell-based disease and organ models that address specific therapeutic areas for our customers. HemoShear’s scientists work in close collaboration with our customers’ scientists to understand biology of diseases, and then select optimal drug compound candidates that are tested in our human surrogate models. By recreating human biology with HemoShear’s technology, we are able to conduct experiments that are far more predictive of human response and reduce risk of costly drug failures.

Customers that work with HemoShear have a competitive advantage by being able to study disease processes in conditions that closely mimic human biology and evaluating drugs in a physiologically relevant environment. HemoShear supports customer drug R&D efforts in the following ways:

Identify Targets and Pathways of Disease Progression: Our human surrogate models provide a robust platform for understanding baseline physiological tissue conditions and an unlimited set of conditions to simulate in vivo blood chemistry to understand the biology of disease and disease progression. We produce re-calibrated human tissue samples, which are analyzed with high content molecular screening tools to provide a rich database for more reliable human target identification and validation.

Evaluate and Select Optimal New Drug Candidates: Challenges in lead candidate selection exist as a result of the lack of models to understand what the human response will be. Our human surrogate technology can complement existing decision-making datasets by evaluating and ranking lead candidate compounds for mechanism of action (MoA), off-target effects, and safety.

Identify Unanticipated Adverse and Off-Target Effects: A majority of drugs make their way into the bloodstream. Whether the intended target is the blood vessel wall, a diseased organ or tissue, our human surrogate models can explain unanticipated responses in the vasculature. These responses may be negative and highlight potential cardiovascular risk (e.g., certain class of COX2 inhibitors, thiazolidinediones) or may be positive and mitigate risk through cardio-protective mechanisms (e.g., statins).

Recast Existing Compounds for Additional Claims or New Indications: Many drugs have an intended target shared by multiple cell types in different organs. Additionally, the consequences of downstream effects of regulating the activity of that target are not well understood due to the limitations of in vitro and in vivo studies. HemoShear’s technology can identify target and off-target pathways and assess functional responses to reveal additional benefits. This may support new treatment indications and/or identify and complement new clinical trial endpoint assessments.

Develop Organ and Disease Models to Provide Strategic Advantages: HemoShear’s platform technology is highly adaptable to meet the needs of its clients. Our vision is to develop the most advanced human surrogate models of organs (including the arterial system, liver, and blood brain barrier) and disease states (for example, atherosclerosis, diabetes and hepatitis) to better understand the underlying human biology and assist in identifying and developing superior therapeutic compounds.