ProFuse Technology—an Israeli startup best-known for media supplements that increase the speed and efficiency of muscle tissue formation in cultivated meat—has launched a high throughput screening platform for skeletal muscle related drug discovery.
One well-publicized and potentially troubling side effect of GLP-1 drugs is a loss of lean muscle mass that frequently accompanies rapid weight loss, prompting a surge of interest in drugs and supplements that can attenuate the problem.
Through its skeletal muscle tissue cultivation platform, ProFuse Technology can screen thousands of molecules to identify promising candidates it can then license to drug companies for further validation, says the firm, which says its cell culture media supplements have proved just as effective on human cells as they have on animal cells.
While drug companies have developed their own in-vitro models to test their products, CTO Dr. Tamar Eigler-Hirsh told AgFunderNews, the human muscle fibers created by ProFuse “demonstrate a significantly higher level of maturity,” which leads to the generation of more “biologically relevant” muscle tissue, more quickly.
“Growing mature muscle tissue in the lab is not easy and the muscle tissue we produce is really better than anything that can currently be made in the life sciences space, where they typically use mouse cell lines for this kind of testing, which have their limitations,” claimed Eigler-Hirsh.
“With mature muscle fibers, we can model muscle diseases and muscle atrophy, plus we’ve also engineered human cell lines to express specific reporters associated with biomarkers that are increased with these disease conditions. This means we can track the progression of these diseases in-vitro in real time.”
As ProFuse can grow “intact muscle fiber in between pillars in a three-dimensional space,” it can also measure muscle functionality (eg. contractions) and how much force the muscle has, said Eigler-Hirsh.
“We have also developed software that allows us to take images of hundreds of thousands of cells, analyze them within a fraction of a second and spit out tons of data showing how efficient the differentiation is, how mature the muscle fibers are, what is the size of the fibers, and so forth.”
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ProFuse Technology expands focus from cultivated meat to drug discovery amid GLP-1 drug boom