InnoSer NV, a young and innovative Belgium based Contract Research Organization (CRO) has received an over € 1.6 million grant from the Flemish VLAIO. This development grant is awarded to set up a PDXO screening platform in partnership with Vrije Universiteit Brussel and in close collaboration with Jessa Hospital in Hasselt, Belgium, and Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) in the Netherlands.
InnoSer aims to develop a new service for the drug discovery and preclinical drug development market, consisting of an anticancer drug screening platform that will significantly boost the predictive value of preclinical testing and discovery of drug compounds that show efficacy in subsequent clinical trials. In the future, this platform will empower personalized medicine, by screening the effectiveness of registered anticancer drugs on individual patients carcinoma’s.
Jan Bartels, CEO of InnoSer, is delighted with the VLAIO grant as this allows further growth and establishment of novel CRO activities for InnoSer. Next to this, it is our expectation that the biomedical community will highly benefit from this PDXO platform to combat the unmet need for reliable, and thus lower attrition rate, in the preclinical oncology testing chain. It is our goal that patients worldwide will have a faster and better access to personalized medicine through this PDXO platform.
InnoSer additionally offers classic CRO services, based on in vivo murine models. With this grant InnoSer wants to provide a completely new preclinical testing service in a commercial setting (as opposed to an academic setting), using Patient Derived Organoid (PDO) technology and widely accepted Patient Derived Xenograft (PDX) in vivo models, collectively called PDXO herein. This PDXO screening platform will be a joint venture to combine the expertise of InnoSer, VUB, Jessa Hospital and LUMC. In order to obtain validated results and market acceptance within a few years, this PDXO platform will be developed using co-clinical trials, studies in which drug responses in patients are matched to results in preclinical models. On top of that, we will have a major contribution in the reduction of using laboratory animals and thus work in compliance with the 3R’s.
With its PDXO services InnoSer targets a specific section of the preclinical drug development market for anticancer drugs, more specifically for oesophageal and gastric cancer (EGC), non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), all selected based on the current high unmet medical need.
About InnoSer
InnoSer started its activities in
2011 to meet the growing demands for professional expertise and
infrastructure for biomedical research. InnoSer offers professional
services to academic as well as private partners in order to facilitate
and accelerate research for new therapies to cure life-threatening
diseases and to improve the quality of life. InnoSer’s service portfolio
includes the execution of preclinical studies, the development and
pathological analysis of rodent models that mimic human diseases
(genetically engineered mouse models or GEMMs), colony management,
sanitation, cryopreservation, rederivation as well as facility
management.