InvivoSciences, Inc. (IVS) is committed to advance innovative therapeutic solutions to life-threatening illnesses, including regenerative medicine, cardiovascular and autoimmune diseases with our tissue-based physiological profiling and phenotypic screening system for the pharmaceutical, defense, cosmetic and consumer chemical industries. IVS strives to produce products of critical importance to human health and quality‐of‐life.
Our phenotypic screening services are for first-in-class drug discovery, drug repositioning and medicalcountermeasures. Our 2012 Edison Award winning engineered tissue based high content analysis assay has combined 3D human cell culture technology with high-throughput phenotypic screening to provide a powerful discovery platform for predicting efficacy and safety of pharmaceutical candidates. Tissue constructs are fabricated using human cells, including cardiomyocytes derived from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). These constructs mimic physiological properties of cardiac and skeletal muscles and connective tissues. The same functional parameters that are used in animal studies and clinical trials are assessed for compound-induced changes in physiological properties of human tissues to help predict clinical responses to reduce cost, and time in drug development. Our commitment to research pushes the boundaries of toxicity assessment in drug discovery and helps reduce the risk of late-stage attrition in clinical trials. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) supports our collaborative research with University of Wisconsin Madison and major pharmaceutical partners to optimize/validate a Live-in-Tissue Analysis™ (LITA™) for profiling cardiac tissue regeneration and drug induced cardiac safety using engineered heart tissues fabricated with human pluripotent stem cells. The cosmetic industry has been using the LITA™ in place of animal testing to evaluate development-stage products. These innovative approaches discovering pharmaceutical and cosmetic products have been recognized by Edison Awards to receive a 2012 Edison Award alongside 3M and CardioIX in the highly competitive Medical Science-Analytic System. The rapid and ever-increasing incidence of heart attack cases in the U.S. and worldwide has driven the demand for therapeutics in this category. Our most recent research efforts are centered on developing an assay system that can screen and profile drug candidates to be used for treating cardiac muscles damaged after heart attacks. A heart attack injures the heart muscle forming wounds that seldom heal, leading to cardiac fibrosis and often death. About 38% of heart attack survivors will die within one year due to the cardiac fibrosis that manifests itself in the altered mechanical performance of the heart and arrhythmogenesis, but few therapeutic options exist. In collaboration with academic laboratories, we are using miniaturized engineered heart tissues that can maintain their physiological or pathological properties for weeks or even months to better understand the mechanics of fibrosis development. Decades of scientific research demonstrates that the integration of a human genomics component early in the drug discovery process increases the potential for success in pharmaceutical development. We have thus introduced a platform technology that incorporates predictive human cell-based, engineered tissue models that generate a uniquely informative biological activities signature for each drug candidate. This yields actionable data that can be used to drive the selection of drug leads that demonstrate the best market potential.