In this informative podcast, Lowry Curley, Chief Executive Officer at AxoSim, a biotech startup, talks about the ways his company is contributing to better drug development.

Curley is a biotech entrepreneur with a background in biomedical engineering. His company’s innovative technology, Nerve-on-a-Chip™ is changing the way drugs are developed and tested.

Curley provides an overview of the past drug modeling that often ended with dismal results. He states that animal models are very ineffective at predicting whether drugs will be successful in human bodies, and surprisingly 94% of the time, after extensive animal testing, the drugs simply don’t work in humans. Curley is quick to point out that you really cannot equate animal biology to human biology.

The biotech expert discusses how AxoSim creates models for drug testing. As Curley explains, they take skin cells and transform them back to stem cells and then ultimately differentiate that into a functional nerve cell. And as this is then engineered into a 3D environment, they can mimic complex interactions that a given cell could experience within the human body. Currently, AxoSim is working with many types of current drugs in development and also looking at past drugs that might have shown promise but were never released to the public for various issues, side effects, etc.

And Curley talks about the methods his company uses to seek out other companies doing similar work, to potentially partner with or acquire them, to maintain their mission of being the industry leader in new drug development processes.

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