Ooc Tech

In vitro cell culture platforms are essential for modern research, clinical studies, and drug development. For more than a century, the petri dish has been the corner stone of in vitro cell culture. The inventor of this technology, Julius Richard Petri, intended its use for the culture of microorganisms. However, time has proven it useful for a large variety of biological and biomedical applications. During over a century, these devices have been produced in a plethora of materials and formats and have supposed a groundbreaking breakthrough in biological research.

However, the unceasing scientific progress has shown that petri dishes do not fully reproduce the reality of in vivo organisms. In other words, to put it plainly, this technology fails to recreate the physiological environment of cells in vivo.
When culturing cells on a plastic or glass plate, we are ignoring many of the stimuli of the microenvironment of the cells in vivo, and that stimuli affects greatly how cells behave and express as they do in the human body. The Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset once said that “I am myself and my circumstances”. This is equally true for cell biology, “the cells are themselves and their microenvironment”. Failing to recreate it correctly, will be misrepresenting the behavior of cells in vivo in its entirety.
This train of thought has lead engineers and biologists all over the globe to start the development of a new generation of cell culture platforms that meet this unfulfilled need of recreating faithfully the microenvironment of the cells. The most promising candidate among these new cell culture platforms are microfluidic devices.

Microfluidics is the science that studies fluidic manipulation in the microscale by confining the fluidic flow in channels of dimensions in that scale (10-6-10-3m). These platforms applied to cell culture are known as “organ on chip” and allow the recreation of the mechanical, electrical, and chemical stimuli that cell undergo in vivo.
Beonchip (Biomimetic Environment On Chip) devoted to the design, development and commercialization of these platforms. Our multidisciplinary team that includes, biologists, engineers, and physicists, works daily to develop new cell culture platforms and models, that represent biological processes fully and show more reliable results than classical in vitro models. Our final goal is reducing the use of animal testing in drug development and toxicity testing by creating a new generation of in vitro platforms for drug development and the identification of new clinical biomarkers, therapies and speed the process of vaccine development up. In addition, the reduction of animal research in favor of in vitro studies will save time and cost to researchers and pharmaceutical companies in their R & D.