3D cell culture models provide the opportunity to better mimic the in vivo microenvironment, and thus better predict in vivo outcomes. Visikol is working to make these tools more widely accessible to its clients, which include the top twenty pharmaceutical companies. As a leading provider of advanced cell culture assay services, Visikol is continually working to expand its portfolio of assays and models as well as reduce their cost and provide clients with higher throughputs. Visikol is making large investments in automation and recently completed the build out of its 3D Cell Culture Center of Excellence with the addition of a Hamilton Microlab® STAR.
Last year, Visikol announced the first of several laboratory expansions and the build out of its 3D Cell Culture Center of Excellence, which is designed to provide clients with best-in-class 3D cell culture assay services. The mission for the Center has been to build a state-of-the-art facility capable of providing high-throughput 3D cell culture assays using the most-advanced and cutting-edge technologies in the marketplace. As a BICO company, this mission aligns with BICO’s bioconvergence mission, which is the concept that through multiple scientific and engineering disciplines, such as robotics, automation, and tissue culture, that we can greatly accelerate life sciences research.
“At Visikol, we strongly believe in the concept of biocovergence. By building the labs of the future through which we combine automation, robotics, big data and advanced cell culture we are truly disrupting how life science research is conducted. We find that combining these technologies allows us to truly make exponential improvements in the type of research we can conduct for our clients,” described Visikol CEO Dr. Michael Johnson.
The Center at Visikol is truly a bioconvergence ecosystem, which is designed to transform 3D cell culture models into large data sets that can be mined for actionable insights using a high throughput automated approach. The Center leverages several key pieces of automation equipment such as the C.WASH™ non-contact plate washer and liquid dispenser from Cytena, the I.DOT from Dispendix and the Hamilton Microlab® STAR. Further, within the Center, Visikol relies upon three high content confocal microscope systems which, when combined with the Visikol® HISTO™ technology, provide an unparalleled level of imaging for addressing a wide range of research questions. From this imaging workflow and Visikol’s other endpoints (e.g., qPCR, plate reading, HPLC, LCMS), Visikol leverages onsite and cloud-based supercomputing to transform enormous amounts of data into actionable insights for its clients.
“These insights help our clients fail drugs faster, to better understand how drugs are metabolized, and answer all sorts of research questions such as how well do biologics penetrate tumors,” described Visikol CSO Dr. Tom Villani. As Visikol continues to grow, it is focused on helping its clients accelerate their drug discovery workflows through the use of 3D cell culture assays and will continually innovate to provide the highest quality assays and the most relevant in vitro models.
For further information, please contact:
Michael Johnson, CEO, Visikol
Email: Michael.johnson@visikol.com