A new contract lab offers pharmaceutical companies a detailed health check on the tiny power plants inside human cells—mitochondria—before they spend millions developing a drug that might silently damage them. Mitochondria are the cell’s energy factories, and when they malfunction, they contribute to a wide range of complex diseases. The problem is that most drug developers lack the tools to see exactly how a candidate compound affects these organelles early in the pipeline. This service fills that gap by using patient-derived cells and measuring over 100 mitochondrial characteristics—function, shape, DNA, waste disposal, and interactions with other cell parts—to give a comprehensive picture of a compound’s effect. If the service succeeds, it could cut the failure rate of drug development. Mitochondrial toxicity is a leading cause of late-stage drug failure, and catching it early saves millions of pounds and years of wasted effort. The data generated also meets the standards for FDA Investigational New Drug applications, potentially speeding up regulatory approval. For patients, this means fewer promising treatments die in the lab, and more therapies that actually work in people reach the clinic.
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Mitotype Precision Labs is a unique, specialist contract service provision that provides rapid, in-depth assessments of potential therapeutic and tool compounds targeting mitochondrial health. The energy factories of the cell, mitochondria, are fundamental to most cell types of the body and become dysfunctional in numerous complex diseases. Deep experimental analysis of mitochondrial health in patient-derived cells is needed by the biotech/pharmaceutical and academic sectors to understand the effects of therapeutic interventions on mitochondria. Mitotype Precision Labs uses an array of state-of-the-art techniques and models, developed by Professor Heather Mortiboys over the last decade, to address the market's two major pains: a lack of information about a therapeutic effect and poor translation of results from the lab to the clinic. The service uses patient-derived cells to ensure the highest accuracy of disease models resulting in the greatest confidence that efficacy in models will translate to patients in the clinic. Our in-depth assays are able to measure over 100 mitochondrial characteristics, including, but not limited to, function, morphology, mitochondrial reactive oxygen species production, mitochondrial DNA, mitophagy and the interaction of mitochondria with other organelles. The in-depth analysis provides excellent patient cell-derived data for FDA Investigational New Drug applications under the new legislation. Mitochondrial damage is often an off-target effect resulting in toxicity and one of the leading causes of therapeutic development failure; early indications of toxicity can be detected by our assays enabling termination before significant financial investment. The use of these accurate disease models and thorough assessment of mitochondrial health ensure early identification of effective and ineffective compounds enabling customers to make confident, swift and highly informed decisions about compound progression, saving time and money.
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