The funding will accelerate personalised gut-on-chip development, integrated biosensors, biosimilar benchmarking, and digital twin capabilities.
NOME company, Cellbox Labs, has secured €3.3 million in non-dilutive funding to advance its organ-on-chip platform. The funding will accelerate four key development areas: scaling its gut-on-chip model for pharmaceutical use, integrating real-time sensor technology, benchmarking biosimilars under dynamic flow, and building digital twin models to link in vitro results to human outcomes.
The company is developing a gut-on-a-chip — a small device containing living human cells that mimics how the gut works. They are working with Altis Biosystems on scaling it up so it can be used for large numbers of tests in pharmaceutical research. The next step is to make these gut models fully personalised by using cells created from an individual’s own tissue (iPSCs) and their unique gut bacteria. This will make it possible to predict how specific people might respond to different drugs, foods or probiotics, and to verify the platform’s accuracy for industry use.
Another priority is the integration of oxygen (O₂) and pH sensors to provide live data in every organ-on-chip assay without additional hardware. This will support the growing industry need for richer datasets in AI-driven drug discovery.
In addition, the company will assess the effects of GLP-1 generics under dynamic flow, comparing the results with static cultures and available animal data. Capturing more physiologically relevant beta-cell responses aims to improve in vitro biosimilar efficacy testing.
Finally, together with ESQlabs and MPSlabs, the company will develop high-fidelity digital twin models of its in vitro systems to generate quantitative insights into drug absorption, distribution and response. These models will be integrated with physiologically based human models to enable in vitro–in vivo translation (IVIVE), strengthening the predictive power of the organ-on-chip platform for human outcomes.
This aligns closely with recent regulatory developments, including the FDA’s announcement to phase out animal testing requirements for monoclonal antibodies and other drugs, and the National Institutes of Health’s requirement that new funding opportunities include computer modelling, AI and organ-on-chip technologies.