Industry Insights with Bas Trietsch and STEMCELL Technologies This episode of Industry Insights features Drs. Bas Trietsch from MIMETAS and Jenna Moccia from STEMCELL Technologies as they explore the use of stem cell-based models in drug discovery. They discuss how regulatory milestones underscore the growing acceptance of these models, prompting scientists to seek out clinically predictive tools such as organoids and organ-on-a-chip systems. This interview has been edited for clarity and conciseness. Click here to watch the full interview. LISTEN TO THE PODCAST:

Could you tell us a bit about MIMETAS and your current role there?

Thank you for having me. Really eager to talk a little bit about the things that we are doing currently at MIMETAS. We're a biotech company in the Netherlands, and we offer organ-on-a-chip solutions to pharma. We work with pharma to help them kickstart and improve their drug discovery processes by offering best-in-class human disease models. I'm one of the cofounders of MIMETAS, we've been around for about a decade, and I've always been pushing our capabilities, pushing the technology, and that's microfluidic products as well as biological products, automation and screening capabilities, data sciences, basically everything we need to do to enable us to achieve our joint goals with our customers and partners faster.

In your experience, why are partners coming to you to collaborate? What challenges are they facing that are leading them to explore more advanced in vitro tissue models and adding those into their research toolkits?

Yeah, I think this really gets us to the heart of the matter very, very, very quickly, right? And that is that most of the easy diseases, we've got solutions for them now, we've got therapies for them now, but there's still a host of afflictions out there that we simply cannot cure. That is, if you use the wrong model to test your new drugs, if you use the wrong systems to do your early research or your late state safety and efficacy assessments, you're going to get the wrong answers. It's much more like a maze. If at the start you take the wrong avenues down that maze, it's very difficult to course-correct. We've found treatments for diseases in mice already multiple times over. We've cured cancer in a vacuum already multiple times over. But, to actually address pathophysiological mechanisms in the full human system requires human-relevant models. This is where people come to us. If they've been struggling already for a long time to understand complex diseases better, to really have a way that allows pharma to modulate biological processes or to test different compounds in a way that actually tells you how this will affect the human body and the mechanisms at play in real, diseased patients. That's where they just need better models. And better models, in our mind, that means 3D systems, always human-based, multiple different cell types together in an architecture and in a context and in a cell-cell interaction environment that really recapitulates the physiological situation to the very best of our abilities . That's often involving human stem cells, using organoids as a base material, but taking these organoids, putting them in the right context, vascularizing them, perfusing them not only with compounds but also with different cell types. We really try to take all of the pieces that make up this very complex interplay between different mechanisms that make up a full pathobiological process. We want to have them in our own hands, have them in an assay that you can modulate, that you can study, and actually do all of those things without sacrificing throughput. Because that's basically the other pillar of what we always want to have in our models. We want to have best-in-class biology with the right interaction between cell types, but at reasonable throughput.

I was wondering if you were prepared to comment on systems that incorporate specifically human stem cell-based biological elements, versus some of the other