Be it cosmetics, supplements or medicines, consumers expect such products to be safe for use or consumption. The default way of ensuring that is to test them on animals in labs.
Given the advancement in science and technology, is there a more humane and ethical way of evaluating the safety of consumer products and their ingredients? The answer lies in organ-on-a-chip technology.
DigitalEdge Singapore talks to Massimo Alberti, CEO and founder of Singapore-based Revivo BioSystems, to learn how the company’s skin-on-chip technology can enable cruelty-free testing in the cosmetic and pharmaceutical fields.
Can you share how Revivo BioSystems encourages a more ethical way of testing cosmetics and medicines?
Revivo BioSystems has developed an organ-on-a-chip technology that is an incarnation of our mission and vision, which is to remove cruelty, increase efficiency and enable personalisation in the cosmetic, pharmaceutical, and nutraceutical industries.
We believe animal testing is unethical and not always the best way of achieving realistic results. Most drugs that pass animal tests fail in clinical trials, which means only a small number of all the compounds tested on animals make it to the market. This is a similar case for the cosmetic industry.
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While alternatives to animal testing are already available in the market, they tend to use very simplistic methods and models. So we came up with a technology that combines the principles of microfluidics with those of biological transport phenomena and tissue engineering to provide a more realistic and more efficient way of testing.
You can load multiple skin tissues — either taken from cosmetic surgery or grown in the lab — onto REVEx, our credit-card-sized microfluidic chip. Since the microfluidic chip has small channels going under the skin tissues to mimic the function of the blood flow, it offers the most realistic tissue model setup available in the market.
The loaded REVEx can then be mounted on our automated fraction collector ReleGo, which allows you to tune the flow rate and temperature to mimic in vivo-like conditions (i.e., a living human) for testing. As such, you can gain a very time-dependent view of how the skin tissue reacts to the compound.
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Why is your organ-on-a-chip solution more accurate than animal testing?
There is very little correlation between humans and animals. For example, the human immune system is very different from that of animals, so the behaviours are different when you test a drug on them. Also, the traditional way of testing is like having a static system, as the skin tissue cells are just submerged in nutrients.
Our solution is more dynamic than traditional solutions, and aims to get as close as possible to what you see in the human body. By offering a continuous flow of nutrients and removing the by-products of the cells, our solution provides a more in-depth view of the skin tissue and how it reacts to the compounds being tested.
Revivo BioSystems’s technology mimics the function of the blood flow to establish realistic conditions and in vivo-like tissue properties for testing. Photo: Revivo BioSystems
What were some of the challenges you faced when developing the organ-on-a-chip solution?
Our solution uses two main kinds of technologies: microfluidics and tissue engineering. So finding engineers and biologists who understand both disciplines was a challenge. Moreover, finding talent who are willing to take risks and join a start-up was difficult during a pandemic, against the backdrop of an unstable economic scenario.
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We, therefore, relied on our founders’, advisors’ and current team’s personal networks, as well as LinkedIn and our investors’ support, to tap on talent locally and abroad. Both sources present challenges, and it takes time to build a strong, committed and motivated team.
We have had to put a solid recruiting process in place, and we want our team members to stay with us for the long run.
In terms of product development, growing and testing skin in a microfluidic setting was much more challenging than the traditional way because there are so many additional parameters to take into account. Some of those considerations include flow rate, temperature, as well as the fact that we were working on a prototype instead of a commercially available system.
Additionally, the pandemic happened two months after we incorporated Revivo BioSystems. Disruptions in our supply chain presented some serious challenges to our operations exactly when we started serving clients. Nevertheless, we managed to deliver even in such situations, building a very strong mindset in our company.
The geopolitical situation currently poses similar challenges, and it is even more serious in a country like Singapore, where most of the tools, instrumentations, consumables and reagents have to be imported as they are not manufactured here.
This is why we are diversifying our pool of suppliers, trying to establish relationships directly with the original manufacturers, and custom developing in-house critical and urgent components/reagents. We are lucky to have talented, resourceful, proactive team members who never give up.
How keen are organisations to adopt your solution?
We are currently working with multinational corporations — such as specialty chemicals company Evonik, which is also one of our investors — and smaller companies like start-ups and research groups in the academic institutions.
Our clients are keen to learn about the technology and explore its different applications. The typical way of using our organ-on-a-chip solution is to understand what happens when you apply a substance topically to the skin, but some clients are looking at systemic applications, such as seeing how the skin tissue reacts if the tested substance flows into the bloodstream.
What’s next for Revivo BioSystems?
We are trying to accelerate further product development and business growth before raising a Series A funding round this year.
Getting funding is challenging as people seem to be less willing to invest in biotechnology companies like us because those solutions tend to take a longer time to become as successful as, say, IT products.
However, we are grateful that the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*Star) and the ecosystem in Singapore provide great support to start-ups. For instance, we managed to reach out to more companies in Singapore to establish collaborations in the future, thanks to SGInnovate’s help.
We are also planning to expand our footprint to Europe as they have a large pool of companies developing cosmetics and researching skincare. It is, therefore, important to demonstrate different applications of our organ-on-a-chip technology.
One of the directions we are taking is to make the skin models more functional, adding other cells to have a larger spectrum of study. That way, we can offer our solution for immune response testing.
Additionally, we will explore the feasibility of using our technology to test other tissues, especially those representing a barrier between the inside and outside of the body. For example, gut tissue testing will be important for pharmaceutical and nutraceutical studies.
The dream is to be able to connect all these tests to get a body-on-a-chip solution. But that requires not only efforts from other companies working in this field and us, but also the regulator’s acceptance and approval of such technologies to eliminate animal testing. Lots of stakeholders’ efforts are needed to make this transition towards ethical innovation in this field.
