Life-saving and revolutionary drug discovery

95% of the drugs in the discovery pipeline fail, costing billions of dollars and loss of human lives and health. Vitroscope’s life science solution vitro.one accelerates the drug discovery with lifelike cell imaging to predict the potential of drugs before they’re tested on animals and humans. We have worked together with them to design an efficient and user-friendly interface that guarantees speed, accuracy, and a smooth user experience.

The vitro.one is an easy-to-use flow chamber platform for researchers to observe living cells under mechanical stress, simulating the human body in the laboratory. It accelerates the drug discovery by identifying new so-called drug targets (drug targets are molecules in the body that are associated with a particular disease and that could be addressed by a drug) and predicting in the laboratory how a drug will work in a human patient.

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The user-centric approach means that our solution is 10-20x faster to use than any other product on the market and requires no special tools or adapters. Our users get successful experiments done at first try, exactly how we envisioned it, implying less wasted research hours.

UX and UI that enable use with little training

The initial setup for the solution was complex and challenging to use, which made it not viable for the market. We worked with extensive user research, testing, and iteration to develop the product into a user-friendly and marketable solution. Now, with an intuitive design and interface, researchers can use it with minimal training in using the tool. This saves time, money, and work that can be used for researching and testing the new drugs.

Reduces costs and need for tests in animals

Over the last year, the test users found four novel drug targets for diabetes-caused kidney disease, a condition that ends up fatal for up to 50% of patients. Enabling quicker and cheaper drug testing and development can have a tremendous positive impact on both quality of life and health care costs. As the vitro.one platform helps researchers not waste time on flawed data, it also reduces the amount of unnecessary further testing on animals.

The ideal scenario for testing new drugs in the laboratory would be to be able to see the effect directly in patients’ bloodstream, but that is, of course, not possible. Vitro.one provides the second-best alternative that solves this problem by simulating the human body. The data is seamlessly fed into a cloud platform that delivers analytics and insights to the user.

A collaboration between Vitroscope, EGGS, and the University of Zurich

Vitroscope emerged from a research collaboration between TrollLABS and NTNU Trondheim and The Interface Group at the University of Zurich. The vitro.one was launched in September 2021 and is a result of the collaboration between Vitroscope and EGGS Design, where we have supported Vitroscope with UX, UI, and design to make the product ready for commercialization.

The result is a platform that is so efficient and user friendly, that novel, inexperienced customers start recording valuable data within three hours of receiving the vitro.one.