# Incorporating Phase I/II drug/chemical metabolism in HTS via micro scale co-culture

> **NIH NIH R44** · ONEXIO BIOSYSTEMS, LLC · 2020 · $913,343

## Abstract

PROJECT SUMMARY
In place of animal testing, high throughput screening (HTS) is used to discover potential drugs and identify
chemicals that are toxic to humans. Federal efforts to reduce toxicity testing in animal models that use HTS
have found that traditional HTS tests lack critical biology, including drug/chemical metabolism and signaling
between different cell types that would result in a more accurate prediction of human toxicities. Researchers in
drug discovery and chemical testing lack a simple, affordable and high-throughput way to co-culture different
cell-types together to improve the human relevance of their tests. Onexio Biosystems is developing an HTS
testing platform that supports co-culture and multi-culture to improve human relevance in drug discovery and
chemical toxicity testing applications. Known as the microDUO, this versatile platform technology supports the
intercellular signaling necessary to improve human relevance, while maintaining full compatibility with standard
HTS instrumentation. The microDUOs innovation lies in the integration of micro-scale diffusion channels
between adjacent pairs or groups of wells (test tubes) in and HTS compatible format. In this grant proposal, we
will continue and expand our Phase 1 SBIR R&D efforts to develop high-priority predictive toxicity assays in the
MicroDUO. We will 1)confer metabolic competence (drug metabolism) to new cell types including GI, lung and
ovary cells by coculturing these cells with liver hepatocyes 2)coculture different cell types from the breast to
rebuild the molecular and cellular events that occur during breast cancer progression and test how chemicals
in the environment might drive cancer progression. 3) test MicroDUO performance across multiple HTS
laboratories and 4)produce a microscope compatible MicroDUO to enable improved understanding of cellular
interactions and toxicities in co-culture.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10012602
- **Project number:** 2R44ES029864-02
- **Recipient organization:** ONEXIO BIOSYSTEMS, LLC
- **Principal Investigator:** Jose Antonio Jimenez-Torres
- **Activity code:** R44 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $913,343
- **Award type:** 2
- **Project period:** 2018-08-01 → 2022-03-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10012602

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10012602, Incorporating Phase I/II drug/chemical metabolism in HTS via micro scale co-culture (2R44ES029864-02). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-22 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10012602. Licensed CC0.

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