Accelerating diabetes drug discovery

Tell us about StemX Bio's mission.

Our mission is to develop revolutionary 3D pancreatic microtissue technology to transform metabolic (diabetes) drug discovery with human-relevant, animal-free models – aiming for faster, more predictive results.

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What makes your technological approach unique?

Our approach has a few clear advantages. The first is the value we bring to our customers: our approach produces robust and reproducible products and results. We are providing a tool that gives drug development companies a higher predictive value. On top, we provide speed: we can create mini pancreases from stem cells in just 15 days when feeding them chemicals, providing our customers with short lead time. Finally, when our technology is used, drug development will not require a lot of animal involvement.

After we grow our mini pancreases, they are injected into the 96- and soon 384-micro-well plates and delivered to customers. This can save them a lot of time and money.

In the ‘normal’ 40 days academic production, animal derived growth factors are used (FCS and growth factors) to grow the mini pancreases but this leads to high production and result variance which is not scalable for industry.

What is the societal relevance of your technological approach?

We believe that patients can get better treatments faster when drug testing reflects human biology. Unfortunately, that’s not the case at the moment. The current models use cancer cell lines and animal models, which are both completely different from what is actually happening in the human body.

This is our focus, solving the translation gap in metabolic disease with better predictive platforms. Using our approach can lead to decrease failure risk in drug testing and reduce the number of so many animals’ sacrifice. That will save drug developers both time and money

How did you get in touch with TNO Fast Track?

About 2 years ago, we got in touch with Ruben Brinckmann from TNO Fast Track to learn what it is about. At that time, we had just the idea and were exploring all funding opportunities. Since then, polished our idea through multiple incubator programs from PLNT (such as "Ready to start", "Start up play" and "unlock_ hub incubation") and participated in the Proefdiervrij Venture Challenge.

During the unlock_ incubation, our mentors Stefan and Barbara - nominated us for the Academic Startup Competition (ASC) where we were one of the selected 40 parties from 100 nominees to participate in the ASC. After this, we secure the exclusive license agreement from LUMC and secure our pre-seed funding round of about 425k from LEH, UNIIQ, InnovationQuarter and couple smaller subsidies from RVO and Stichting Proefdiervrij.

With this funding we bootstrapped our company, formed our lab at BioPartner 3 and we got in touch again with Ruben so that we can start the TNO Fast Track with a concrete project in mind. Now we grow our team and move closer to commercialization, so our mission was only made possible through the community and ecosystem that believed and supported us for which we are eternally grateful.

How has TNO helped along the way?

TNO - through Holst Centre - is providing the design of the 384-micro-well plates for high-throughput testing, which is not on the market yet. Current methods use 96-micto-well format and with gel in the micro-wells of the plates. At StemX Bio we don’t need gels – such as ECM’s (extra cellular matrix) – which makes our process cheaper and easier to produce.

How would you describe the business relevance of the support you received?

Customers – contract research organization and academic institution - were asking for a specific product and TNO have help us created the prototypes. We know TNO holds a lot of expertise in micro-wells and plate design. This is true partnership where we express our wishes and TNO provides design and execution.

Also we are expanding our partnership through a grant application from Health Holland. The overall process of involvement of TNO Fast Track has helped accelerate the commercial readiness of our product.

How do you look back at TNO’s support?

Everything went very fast. There was a lot of expertise in the different areas. TNO is able to connect us to the relevant parties in the market when we have a working prototype. We really appreciate TNO pushing us forward.