Structured around development of the next generation of invitro systems enabling scientists better to understand the causes of human diseases - human micro tissue environment within small, disposable, microfluidic chips - Nortis is a biotech company developing tissue-engineering techniques ... creation of human micro tissue environment within small, disposable, microfluidic chips. An Organs-on-Chip company, Nortis is making - has made - a radical shift away from traditional drug development and discovery processes. With biopharma leaders and top academic centers lready using its systems - University of Washington, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Organs-on-Chip is a rapidly emerging field in the life sciences market â the firm's ParVivo system is designed 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 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. An important example would be the proximal tubule of the human kidney shown in many cases to be more sensitive to drug side effects than animal kidneys. Developed on the ParVivo system, Nortis and the firm's collaborators have also developed issue models for brain, heart, liver, immune system, blood vessels, and cancer applications.
