Novel Phenomics NASH In Vitro Assay Presented by InSphero AG and PharmaNest Inc at 2021 Society of Toxicology Meeting
Introduction of key technology to accelerate NASH drug discovery by combining 3D disease models and automated AI-based fibrosis quantification.
PRINCETON, N.J. – March 29, 2021 - During the 2021 Society of Toxicology (SOT) Annual Meeting, researchers from Swiss-based InSphero AG and US-based PharmaNest Inc. have presented a novel key technology to help drug developers in their search for therapeutics against non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH).
While industry and academia search for safe and efficacious drugs against the disease globally, progress has been delayed by limitations related to reliable early human efficacy testing of drug candidates in vitro. It is especially difficult to reliably quantify the onset and progression of fibrosis, the critical hallmark of the disease that leads to end-stage liver cirrhosis. To provide a scalable, robust, and biologically relevant discovery platform, PharmaNest and InSphero have teamed up to combine their expertise in tissue engineering, disease modeling, and artificial intelligence-based quantitative image analysis. This game-changing preclinical discovery platform enables scalable human-based drug efficacy assessment, screening, combinatorial testing, as well as the study of complex NASH pathophysiology.
The current FDA surrogate endpoints for the approval of NASH therapies include the histological assessment of liver biopsies for fibrosis and its associated features. Quantitative assessment of fibrosis using more than 300 histological fibrotic parameters by the FibroNest Digital Pathology platform demonstrated the efficacy of anti-fibrotic tool compounds that block TGF-β in InSphero's 3D InSight™ Human Liver NASH Model. These data correlated well with the decrease in the secretion of the clinical biomarker pro-collagen type III in the same model.
"The computational quantification of fibrosis in our NASH model with the FibroNest method is extremely robust and sensitive. It provides insights into the fibrosis phenotype that correlate well with adult patients with NASH", says Radina Kostadinova, Product Manager at InSphero.
The superior capability of the FibroNest technology to quantify collagen fibers and their architecture in the 3D InSightâ„¢ Human Liver NASH Model was highlighted, showcasing both small and large molecules at SOT 2021 (replay available on the companies' websites). "The success of the Digital Pathology assay developed with InSphero is further evidence of the translational performance of FibroNest, which now can be used not only with adult NASH patient biopsies but now with in vitro models," says Mathieu Petitjean, CEO of PharmaNest.
About PharmaNest, Inc.
PharmaNest is an Artificial Intelligence and Digital Pathology company focused on the development and validation of novel standards for the quantification of the histological phenotypes of Fibrosis and its associated features for drug discovery and development. PharmaNest's FibroNest cloud-based image analysis tool provides the most advanced cloud-based phenotypic, translational, and quantitative image analysis platform for the automated quantification of fibrosis and associated histological features for non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) and other fibrotic conditions. FibroNest has been validated to establish continuous scores for the assessment of the severity and progression of fibrosis in +20 pre-clinical models and, most recently, in clinical PBC, Adult NASH, and Pediatric NASH. It remains a research-only-use tool at this stage.
