2013 Press Releases
Gateway to first bioartifical liver
Irish biotech Luxcel Biosciences Ltd, housed by UCC’s leading incubation and innovation centre gatewayUCC, recently welcomed NanoBio4Trans. The group seeks to deliver the world’s first bio-artificial liver by 2020.
Luxcel, an award-winning spinout from UCC’s Biochemistry Department, partnered with five European industry leaders in 2012, successfully pitching for a project based on a €7.7m EU grant within the Seventh Framework Programme. The collaborative project, known as ‘NanoBio4Trans’, aims to produce an artificial liver to support liver function in patients requiring a donor organ, or who are in desperate need of time until their damaged liver has recovered.
With demand for donor organs constantly oversubscribed, success on this front would reduce the heavy burden placed on global health services. Problems relating to organ transplantation, such as organ rejection, and the necessity for life-long medication (and concurrent side-effects) in transplanted patients, would be much reduced if a fully functional bio-artificial liver became a reality.
The gathering brought together the leading partners in the project, including DTU, Celectis, BioModics and the University of Groningen to discuss progress made on the research to date. The group are eyeing the year 2020 as a feasible delivery date for a prototype to supports patients with weak liver function.
Luxcel counts a global list of companies as its customers in the pharmaceutical drug discovery, food safety, packaging (pharma, food & beverage), and seed production industries, with plans to move into related markets, including water safety and environmental toxicity screening. The company produces advanced sensor technologies for the non-invasive measurement of oxygen. The measurement of oxygen provides high quality, enabling information on many important biological processes and the sensors can be exploited in a wide range of major life science-based markets.
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