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 technology that recreates the human intestinal epithelium. Our organ on a chip 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 disease modeling, precision medicine, microbiome research, and drug testing. The primary users of our product would be pharmaceutical companies and CROs.
We are able to deliver our solution in two formats: a 2D monolayer and a 3D intestinal cell model. The 2D monolayer format produces a continuous layer of differentiated cells on a flat surface, and the 3D intestinal cell model forms the stem and differentiated 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 drug testing. Currently, scientists are using Caco-2 cells (cancer cells) and animals to test drugs during preclinical studies. But Altis’s organ on a chip products will allow scientists to test drugs using normal human tissue. Our goal is to make drug discovery, disease modeling, and microbiome research 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.