Altis Biosystems articles

Tumor Necrosis Factor Alpha (TNF-a) is a potent cytokine that is over-expressed by cells during chronic intestinal inflammation. Furthermore, TNF-a represents the most validated clinical target for ulcerative colitis (UC) and inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD) with multiple emerging neutralizing/inflammation-reducing therapeutics targeting this cytokine for inactivation. TNF-a activation of intestinal epithelia can disrup

Both current in vitro and in vivo models used in the development of candidate therapies for the treatment of intestinal diseases have severe limitations. RepliGut®, an in vitro human intestinal epithelial stem  cell model, addresses many of these issues and has significant potential to reduce the time and cost of drug development. This model may even help to identify optimal therapies

Advanced microphysiological systems can replicate aspects of intestinal complexity, such as epithelium self-renewal by stem cells in in vitro crypts or the interactions of microbes and intestinal epithelium mediated by a mucus layer. Availability of such models is key to progress in compound screening, disease modeling, and microbiome research.

Intestinal inflammatory diseases are highly complex, which has thus far prevented development of an effective in vitro disease model. With access to a donor-derived cell biobank and the ability to recapitulate region-specific environments of the intestine, Altis Biosystems is working toward the development of an in vitro RepliGut® model to accurately recapitulate the complex intestinal inflammatory microenvironments.

There is a growing need to address the high failure rate of drug candidates as they progress through clinical trials. Altis Biosystems aims to bring its technological advances to the forefront, enabling the drug development process to more effectively translate results from preclinical experiments to late-stage clinical trials.

The variety of normal and diseased human tissues needed to perform comprehensive screening of drug candidates is a key resource for next-generation preclinical models, but obtaining these tissues is challenging. Gene editing enables Altis Biosystems to offer a diverse array of RepliGut^® human gut models tailored for specific research programs.

Due to a lack of robust in vivo gut models, animal studies are generally required to evaluate gut toxicity. However, these studies can be lengthy and expensive and may not accurately recapitulate the behavior of the human gastrointestinal tract. Drugs are thus often developed with undesired gut side effects that are not apparent until clinical trials.

The microbiome has been shown to play roles in many different disease processes and is implicated in many more, from infectious and gastrointestinal diseases to autoimmune and neurological disorders. Advanced models of the gut leveraging intestinal and colonic stem cells are enabling the development of more reliable and robust systems for evaluating the impact of changes in the microbiome on gut health and screenin