A Mubadala-backed biotech is using patient tumor tissue grown in a petri dish to change precision oncology
As Duke professor Xiling Shen tells it, the idea for his new biotech Xilis dates all the way back to 2009. Shen taught at Cornell at the time, researching circuit design in the university’s bioengineering department, when he came across a paper from Dutch biologist Hans Clevers about a technology called “organoids,” or tissue cultures made up of “3D gel.”
Shen tells Endpoints News he saw the therapeutic potential here, allowing scientists to test drugs on real patient tissue in petri dishes in what would be a first, but also wondered about the limitations of such technology. Could this process be accomplished quickly and cheaply? And how challenging would it be to scale up the tech to the point where it could be widely used?
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