There’s a renewed focus here at Axol Bioscience and it’s about speeding up drug development times with better, more accurate in vitro models of human disease.

 

When we started out in 2013 our focus was making high-quality, reliable cells derived from human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) as widely available as possible.

Over the years we’ve grown as a company: mergers, partnerships, new products, and new people. Not to mention the increase in demand for our iPSCs and the cells we make from them.

And this is obviously a great thing but as we’ve changed, our focus and the way we speak about things have only been updated bit-by-bit and so maybe hasn’t been as clear as it should be.

So, we’re fixing that this year with a brand refresh.

A renewed focus

Firstly, our new focus: to make and offer better models of human disease.

Up until now, research has relied on animal models and immortalized cell lines that don’t always represent what happens in humans. From a basic research perspective, that’s a serious problem. But from a drug development perspective, it’s the same problem but it also costs vast amounts of time and money and delays getting potential treatments to the people who need them.

Only 1 in 10 drugs in development make it out of the labs because while early work on non-human models can look good, once they move to humans, they just didn’t work like they were supposed to. Or later testing shows that a drug in development actually has major safety concerns – often affecting the heart.

But our iPSCs are made from humans, and so the cells we make from them are also human. This means we can offer a real human model to test early drugs in. Our iPSC models give truer results than animals and can detect safety issues sooner. This means drugs can be scrapped earlier if need be – fail fast – to save valuable time and resources and, ultimately, help get treatments to patients sooner.

And with the FDA Modernization Act allowing in vitro models, like our iPSC-derived cells, to be used for early drug testing, we are in a prime position to help more researchers than ever before.

Yes, full adoption of this will take years. But we’re in this for the long haul and we really believe this is where disease research and drug development need to go. And we want to be there when and as it does.

Because better in vitro models of human disease reduce the risk, cost, and time it takes for drug development.

Our focus now is firmly on providing you with those better models of human disease.

Refreshed products that are better than ever

Secondly, we’ll be dividing our products and services into three broad groups:

axoLines^TM
Our iPSCs from consenting patients.

axoServices^TM
This is where you can really make use of our expertise and have us run custom lab services, like multi-electrode array analysis, genome editing sequencing, and stem cell reprogramming and differentiation.

axoCells™
The existing catalog of human iPSC-derived disease and control cells. You’ll also see a few changes on the website that reflect these new product groups. If you want to more about these updates, take a look at our list of products here.

It’s the same Axol you’ve always relied on

Finally, don’t worry, we won’t be changing the product names and codes, deleting lots of existing material from the site, or dramatically swapping out the logo! This is a brand refresh that’s meant to refocus our aims and ambitions.

This a hugely exciting time for Axol as we sit poised to deliver better models of human disease to more people than ever. Better models mean better research and better drugs in the future.

We’re optimistic about where we’re going because we believe it’s the best and right thing to do (and we have a whole lot of data to support that).

Let’s make better models of human disease, together.