Altis Biosystems, a biotechnology company based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, has developed a patent-pending stem cell technology that recreates the human intestinal tissues.
The company’s goal is to make drug discovery, disease modeling and microbiome research faster, cheaper and safer. It also wants to reduce the need for animal testing by telling potential clients to “go with your gut.”
The company uses its organ on chip products to help produce layers of human or animal intestinal stem and differentiated cells, either of the small or large intestine.
“Basically what we are doing is using a plastic plate the size of your hand to grow intestinal stem cells directly from donor transplant organs,” CEO Michael Biron said. “This is important because the pharmaceutical industry is not able to culture intestinal stem cells to normal human tissue right now.”
Altis is a spin-out company from the Allbritton and Magness labs at UNC-Chapel Hill. After licensing the technology and process of culturing the cells from UNC-Chapel Hill, it has several patents and exclusive rights.
Altis was involved in KickStart Venture Services, a department within the UNC-CH Office of Technology Commercialization. The venture service supports faculty startup formation, business development, and growth by providing coaching and mentoring, early-stage funding, connection with key service providers, management, investors, and space.
“KickStart provided us with business development, conferences and grant writing services for SBIRs,” said Biron, a co-founder of Altis Biosystems.
Biron has over 13 years of operational management experience, from being a U.S. Army officer to several years as a top sales representative. He previously worked in construction management and was responsible for overseeing a variety of residential, multifamily, and commercial interior construction projects valued up to $26 million.
With five co-founders — three in management and two in scientific advising — Altis launched in 2017.
Currently, scientists are using cancer cells and animals to test compounds during pre-clinical studies. However, Altis’s “organ on a chip” products will allow scientists to test compounds using normal human tissue.
Its solution comes in two formats: a 2D monolayer and a 3D intestinal cell model.
The 2D monolayer format produces a continuous layer of differentiated cells on a flat surface and the 3D intestinal cell model forms the stem and differentiated cells to the contours of the large intestine’s lining.
Seeking more funding
After receiving a $5.3 million research award from the National Institutes of Health, the company was able to fund its business and is now looking to start a series A round of funding between $2.5 million to $3 million.
“The Chapel Hill area is notoriously limited on investment capital, but we reach out to the investing community in the area and other regions as well,” Biron said. “Our goal is to raise our series A round of funding and get an additional phase 1 and phase 2 SBIR.”
The Small Business Innovation Research program (SBIR) would help fund the company in general, Biron said, and has allowed for extensive use in materials and research.
The highly competitive program is an award-based program that enables small businesses to explore their technological potential.
In the past, pharmaceutical industries have used animal models or cells and cancer cell lines which Biron said is not physiologically relevant to humans, so their patent-pending product is essential in pharmaceutical development because everything absorbed into one’s body goes through their intestines, making it a critical organ to test.
“There are microbiomes throughout the body, including large intestine,” Biron said. “We are finding out now that the bacteria in there is impacting the rest of the body in ways people didn’t realize before.”
Biron believes there aren’t any good models out there to test the microbiome, so their model is the first one available to give people the ability to examine their intestines.
Psyiologically more relevant
Its product is an anaerobic device, which permits no oxygen so bacteria can survive and feed the cells with oxygen without allowing the bacteria to get affected. The cultured cells grow through a transwell multiple plate format, which can have a range of 12 to 96 different cultures growing on each plate.
While their platform isn’t less expensive than other cancer cell lines, Biron said clients are getting physiologically more relevant cells when people purchase Altis’ product.
“Our platform, using three major pharma companies drugs, was able to recapitulate what they saw in human cells,” Biron said. “It’s a much more physiologically relevant platform and because of that there’s a high failure rate with drugs going through clinical trials of about 88 percent.”
However, if you have a better platform to test your drugs on earlier in the process, it’ll save money in the long run because of less failure and more success, Biron said.
Last year Altis began creating profits with beta companies, which helped increase revenue and usage with customers. Biron said the company is now seeing interest from the data that was developed on the platform last year.
Since there was no data on the company in early 2017 until industry partners came along, Altis was unable to press pharmaceutical companies to purchase its product. However, in 2018, Altis began working with early customers who paid for the service and helped generate data on its platform.
Altis currently has 10 clients, a mix of large pharmaceutical companies and smaller middle-tier companies too.
Its primary demographic is pharmaceutical companies and secondary market of interest is animal health companies because its product can culture animal cells on it as well. Smaller, but new markets include nutraceuticals consumer product companies and businesses that make goods such as probiotics and dietary supplements.
The company currently has seven full-time employees, including the five founders, and is looking to expand over the next year.
While the Chapel Hill-based company also hopes to get a new phase 1 and phase 2 SBIR, it also hopes to move soon into a facility in the Research Triangle Park.
