Looking forward, what are the major trends in drug development, especially relative to DiPole Materials’ work?

Ultimately, increasing the efficiency in the drug development process – which is a function of speed as well as efficacy.

One wayDiPole fits into thatdrug development pipeline is through creation of our scaffolds for high through-put screening of treatments. High through-put screening works by screening a panel of treatments rapidly and in a cost-effective manner.

If you think about testing drugs, the most “real” response is seen in humans during clinical trials.Indeed, if it was safe and efficient for a patient to take a drug still in development, that’s what you’d want to do, But, of course, that’s veryunsafe and cost-ineffective.

So, the next step back from human testing is taking a treatment and testing in ananimal model. The problem with this is it’s also fairly cost ineffective, and so that’s why you take another step back and you look at tissue culture models. Those are the cheapest.

Unfortunately,tissue cultures arethe least representative of a human system. The goal, as always, is to end up with a process where you can do something cheaply, quickly, efficiently and have it be as representative as possible as that end use.

With our 3D gelatin-based scaffolds, DiPole helps close that gap between the distance that exists now starting with a tissue culture plate and hoping to end up impacting human health.