BioSystics, Inc., a database and analytics company, announced it has merged with Nortis, a microphysiology systems platform company to form Numa Biosciences, Inc., a precision medicine platform company.
"BioSystics is excited by the merger with Nortis with the creation of Numa Biosciences and the opportunity to have a major impact on the emergence of patient-derived MPS for precision medicine," says D. Lansing Taylor, PhD, Chairman of BioSystics. "The database and analytics team will be centered in Pittsburgh and will be expanding."
BioSystics, Inc., a recent spin-off from the University of Pittsburgh (UPitt), has been developing the Microphysiology Systems Database, the core of the BioSystics Analytics Platform (BioSystics-APtm), with funding over the last ten years from the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS). BioSystics obtained an exclusive license from UPitt and has been offering versions of the branded BioSystics-AP online to non-profits and on-site to for-profit customers. An early focus of the company has been the workflow from early drug discovery and development through "preclinical trials" using data generated from a broad range of advanced in vitro models, particularly human microphysiology systems (MPS), as well as animal models and clinical data. The BioSystics-AP is being used to access, manage, analyze, share and computationally model data from these experimental models.
A key advance toward precision medicine has been the use of patient-derived human microphysiology systems (MPS) based on organoids and induced pluripotent stem cells that are layered and/or bioprinted in 3D to implement multiple organ models that recapitulate the heterogeneity of patient diseases.
