LUCERO BIO: Smart Optofluidic Isolation of Spheroids for Early-Stage Drug Discovery

Introduction

Personalised medicine has become a key focus for the pharmaceutical industry as it can address global health challenges, such as strong variations of drug efficacy and toxicity linked to different patient subgroups.

Challenges in Pharmaceutical Development

A major obstacle that pharmaceutical companies still face is the lack of enabling technologies to predict the effects of drug candidates in patients before entering clinical trials. In preclinical drug screening procedures, pharmaceutical companies demand that the technologies be selective in terms of detection and isolation of patient-derived 3D cell cultures while being scalable for high-throughput drug screening.

Lucero's Solution

Lucero fills this need by providing a novel cell-handling platform that combines microfluidics, optical tweezers, and artificial intelligence. During our ERC PoC project, we developed an integrated benchtop device for in-vitro handling of single 3D cell cultures, in particular mini spheroids.

Future Developments

Lucero will build on this achievement by expanding our prototype’s functionalities and adapting its design to:

1. Automatically detect spheroid viability
2. Fully automate their isolation
3. Match the drug screening workflow

By thoroughly testing the prototype’s performance and compatibility with our large European pharmaceutical partner on-site, we will mature our prototype to technological readiness level (TRL) 6. Based on their feedback, we will increase our commercial readiness level (CRL) 6 and will be ready for the next acceleration phase.

Intended Outcomes

The intended result of this proposal is to introduce Lucero’s 3D cell-handling platform as an enabling tool for pharmaceutical companies to develop more effective “near-patient” treatments at a lower cost, as well as to establish Europe as a leader in precision healthcare.