Ryan Larock

Nortis

Nortis is a privately held Organs-on-Chip company that is revolutionizing traditional drug development and discovery processes. Nortis currently works with biopharma leaders and top academic centers like the University of Washington, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). For more information about Nortis visit www.nortisbio.com. Organs-on-Chip is a rapidly emerging field in the life sciences market - it covers the engineering of living human tissues within microfluidic devices called chips. Nortis'​ groundbreaking ParVivo system aims to provide powerful alternatives to the use of laboratory animals in the pharmaceutical industry, academic research and the cosmetics industry. Currently there is a gap between the following: in-vitro modeling, in-vivo testing and clinical results. Two dimensional models do not allow the biology to respond in a manner that it would in-vivo, and animal testing often does not correlate with human responses. By growing tissue from human organ systems inside small microfluidic chips, researchers and assay developers can conduct in-vitro testing directly on functional human tissues. One example is the proximal tubule of the human kidney, which has been shown in many cases to be more sensitive to drug side effects than animal kidneys. Other tissue models that Nortis and our collaborators have developed on the ParVivo system include brain, heart, liver, immune system, blood vessels, and cancer applications.