Quasi-Vivo Toxicity Testing

Kirkstall is developing in-vitro cell culture systems. It recently completed a GRD Research
project which established the technical and commercial feasibility of using technology
licensed from the University of Pisa, to detect chemical toxicity. The GRD project also
enabled the company to transfer the technology from Pisa into its laboratories in Sheffield,
and to incorporate it into its first product, the Quasi-Vivo™ cell culture kit.
This GRD Development project will aim to demonstrate the functionality of Kirkstall's existing
Quasi-vivo™ system in new applications and add new features to the product to create a
second generation prototype. Both these developments will help Kirkstall to better match the
needs and demands from an emerging market for animal-free testing of product safety and
efficacy.
Although the Quasi-Vivo™ system is already being used by the academic research
community and for contract research, the product needs further development to meet the
needs of the chemical, cosmetics and pharmaceuticals industry. Potential customers are
looking for further evidence that the Quasi-Vivo™ system is more effective than existing
methods. This project will aim to produce such evidence by investigating the correlation
between existing in-vivo clinical data on 12 pharmaceutical and chemical com~ounds and the
results from testing the toxicity of these same compounds in the Quasi-VivoT system. In
addition it will add new features to the cell culture chambers to facilitate the optical
observation of large cell colonies with 30 structure. This will be an important tool to aid the
development of more representative tissue models for the study of chemical safety and
toxicity.