Altis’s mission is to develop, manufacture and sell innovative research tools to accelerate drug development. These tools will allow scientists and pharmaceutical companies to more quickly and accurately have access to the medicines they need, at a much lower cost.
Altis Biosystems is a biotechnology research tools company, based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Altis has developed patent-pending stem cell technologies that recreate the human intestinal epithelium. Our products produce a layer of human or animal intestinal stem and differentiated cells, either of the small or large intestine. These cells can be used for drug testing, microbiome research and precision medicine. The primary users of our product would be pharmaceutical companies and CROs.
We are able to deliver our solution in two formats. The first format produces a continuous layer of cells on a flat surface, and our second format forms the cells to the contours of the large intestine’s lining, mimicking the architecture and polarization of crypts.
We consider our platforms to be the next generation in preclinical testing. Currently, scientists are using Caco-2 cells (cancer cells) and animals to test drugs before humans. But Altis’s products will allow scientists to test drugs using normal human tissue. Our goal is to make drug discovery faster, cheaper, safer, and to reduce the need for animal testing.
Altis is a spin-out company from the Allbritton and Magness labs at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Nancy Allbritton’s team has been responsible for several other successful companies, including Cell Biosciences (now Protein Simple), Intellego, and Cell Microsystems.