Emulate Announces Strategic Collaboration

Emulate, Inc. announced a strategic collaboration with Laboratory Corporation of America® Holdings (LabCorp®) that seeks to integrate Emulate’s Organs-on-Chips technology into preclinical drug evaluation and testing services. Emulate’s proprietary technology attempts to recreate the natural physiology of human tissues and organs, and is designed to provide a predictive model of human response to diseases, medicines, chemicals and foods with greater precision and detail than other preclinical options. The collaboration will combine the advanced technology capabilities of Emulate and the end-to-end drug development expertise of Covance Drug Development, with the goal of qualifying and commercializing the Organs-on-Chips technology as a new platform to enhance preclinical drug development for pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.

The companies will work together to identify and qualify specific applications in which Emulate’s Organs-on-Chips platform can help improve the existing drug development process. The first application is focused on the Kidney-Chip, and is examining how the Organ-Chips can assist in drug-transporter interaction assessments, a component of preclinical testing that will benefit from appropriate modeling using in vitro human systems. The initial collaborative work on the Kidney-Chip will concentrate on gaining a better understanding of how this model can best be applied in the drug evaluation process. The successful application of this technology could allow for better and earlier decisions to be made about potential drug candidates.  The parties’ collaboration agreement allows for future expansion to additional Organ-Chips as well as, where appropriate, commercialization of the Organs-on-Chips technology.

“We are pleased to partner with Emulate on technology that shows promise to help improve the speed and success of early-stage drug evaluation,” said Dr. Steven Anderson, Ph.D., chief scientific officer for Covance. “This project is indicative of our commitment to support and implement innovative technology that can help to reduce the time, costs and risks of drug development.”

“As a leading drug development company with vast experience in drug testing standards and methodologies, Covance is the ideal partner to help accelerate the adoption of our Organs-on-Chips technology for broad application as a platform in drug development,” said Geraldine A. Hamilton, Ph.D., President and Chief Scientific Officer of Emulate. “Together, Covance and Emulate bring a combination of scientific and operational expertise to implement Organs-on-Chips as a new technology, alongside existing preclinical practices, so that we can achieve our goals of establishing improved standards, creating more predictive models, and helping to speed the development of innovative medicines.”