To improve the effectiveness of drug discovery, there is a critical need for real-time physiological assays that are capable of measuring 3D living tissues responding to drugs. This project plans to establish a small and robust platform that can be placed in pharmaceutical R&D laboratories for peer testing and evaluation. Biodynamic imaging may enable discovery of new dynamic processes within tissues initiated by applied drugs and will establish the physiological-molecular mechanism-of-action connection that has been so elusive in drug discovery. Biodynamic imaging provides a physiological phenotypic profile that complements molecular target-based drug discovery. Once the connection between biodynamics and cellular function has been established, biodynamic imaging will become the tool of preference for investigations of tissue-based functional mechanisms.
This project has the potential to lay the foundation for biodynamic imaging to become a new imaging tool with a broad array of future biomedical applications. These potential applications include the discovery of new drug candidates with lower side effects and lower costs to consumers, the selection of cancer chemotherapy specifically tuned to the patient to improve outcomes and patient quality of life, and improvement in the success rate of in vitro fertilization to reduce health-care costs and remove medical complications of multiple births. Because biodynamic imaging is a general imaging technique that accesses a universal property of living tissue, it can become a workhorse laboratory tool placed in virtually every life sciences laboratory.
This project involved the participation of three participants (entrepreneurial lead, business lead and PI) in the NSF I-Corps program. This is a six-month entrepreneurial boot camp that teaches the team how to develop a business model along the lines of Steve Blank's Lean Startup. The team performed over 100 interviews of customers, channels and partners as they modified their business plan depending on the results of the interviews. The key question was whether there should be a "pivot" in the business model depending on the responses of the inverviews. In this project, the key market of cancer therapeutic selection was identified as the most promising market, with a CRO business model. Partners were identified to help with co-development of the technology. At the end of the project, a minimum viable product (MVP) was constructed and demonstrated successfully at an industry workshop on the Purdue campus. The activities supported by NSF in the I-Corps program has helped define a clear business model for technology that had been developed under other NSF funding. This technology can proceed towards commercialization. A key element of this program was the weekly re-assessment of existing business models. This weekly process continues beyond the NSF I-Corps program as the project continues to work towards commercialization.
