CHERRY BIOTECH

The pharmaceutical and medical fields need more predictive models to assess the effects of drugs on patients. The demand arises from the desire to replace animal tests, enhance predictability, and reduce drug development time and costs. In personalized medicine, there's a need for tools like companion diagnostics to identify patients who will benefit and respond from specific treatments. Recent changes in EU and US regulations, allowing drug candidates to be submitted without animal testing, have led to the development of alternative solutions like 3D cell culture and organs-on-a-chip. These technologies have shown promise in predicting drug effects on patients, but 3 scientific challenges persist, namely including functional vascular interfaces, multilayer tissue equivalent reconstruction without PDMS, and cultivating interconnected organs with varying oxygen concentrations. Also, 2 industrial bottlenecks on the compatibility with multiwell plate formats and the need for reproducible biological protocols are present. Cherry Biotech has developed a 3D cell culture platform that addresses these bottlenecks with three innovations: the Microfluidic Perfusion Lid (MPL), the Hydroflat, and the Cubix control unit. These innovations have received approval from industrial and hospital partners and has been patented in Europe and US. The company aims to address the preclinical drug development (CubiX RUO, 2026) market and the precision medicine market (CubiX CDx, 2030). The preclinical drug development market is growing rapidly due to favorable regulatory changes, while the precision oncology market is driven by biomarker-based assays for guiding medical treatments. Cherry Biotech's work not only has financial implications but also has a significant impact on human health and animal welfare by offering predictive models and reducing the need for animal testing. It contributes to technological advancement and innovation in the EU.