Reflections from the Non-Animal Technologies Network Vanguard Symposium in sydney

Here’s what I’m seeing from the NAMs space lately, following the Non-Animal Technologies Network (NAT-Net) Vanguard Symposium in Sydney last week:

→ My favorite talk was linked to a new strategy for dynamic control of cell exposure to signals which drive cell fate decisions. As someone who has spent a lot of time thinking about the complex mixture of signaling molecules that is fetal bovine serum, I found this an interesting new technology with a number of commercial implications.

→ A huge range of new organoid models were presented; cell culture media and surface stiffness are two key parameters that often help optimise a given model.

Reproducibility challenges linked to handling were repeatedly cited; robotics are often the solution of choice.

For one model, it took over a year to screen over 20 different combinations of cytokines. That’s a lot. I’m not sure what approach they took here, but I would love to see more academic scientists reach for design of experiments-based methodologies or Bayesian approaches to accelerate these kinds of studies.

→ I’m seeing increasing overlap in a specific challenge faced by two different groups of scientists.

On the NAM side: scientists trying to replace animal dosing studies with cell-based dose-response data.

On the biopharma side: scientists running large scale cell-based assays to discover new drugs.

The challenge is that albumin present in fetal bovine serum binds certain drug candidates, which impacts potency. FBS batch variability makes this more problematic. However, our animal-free FBS replacement contains a much lower albumin content and as a result, we’ve worked with scientists on the biopharma side to switch their cultures to FRS in order to remove that confound and inconsistency. This means cleaner screening data and an easier case to make to regulators on assay reliability.

And of course it was great to be able to share some of the results of our FRS pilot studies, completed across a range of Australian and NZ labs over the last 18 months. Thank you to those labs for allowing me to present your data and thank you to Beyond Animal Research for support of the NZ pilot studies!

P.S. NZ scientists, this access program is ongoing, so please reach out if you are keen to test some FRS Pioneer!