PWS-on-Chip

Prader-Willi syndrome disrupts appetite regulation, growth, and metabolism through the hypothalamic–endocrine axis. Therapeutic development runs into a basic obstacle: no single cell culture or animal model reproduces how the affected tissues behave together, so candidate drugs are screened against a picture of the disease that is missing most of it.

One tissue at a time is the problem

PWS-on-Chip links the organ systems implicated in Prader-Willi syndrome on a single device, so their interactions can be observed and perturbed together rather than inferred from separate wells.

Models are built from patient-derived material, so a screen can reflect variation between individual patients rather than a single reference line. Readouts are continuous rather than endpoint-only, which means a programme can see when an effect appears, not just whether it is there at the end.

Who it is for

Pharmaceutical developers and contract research organisations running therapeutic programmes in Prader-Willi syndrome and related hypothalamic-endocrine disorders — where the alternative is a model that misses tissue crosstalk, or a study that cannot be run at all.

How we engage

Licensing and fee-for-service. We develop custom disease models scoped to a specific programme, or provide platform access under licence.

Device architecture, scaffold chemistry, sensor design, and fabrication methods are proprietary and are disclosed only under NDA.

Where this comes from

Our founders published on microfluidic multi-organ platforms for drug discovery in 2016, setting out the design principles and the difficulties — scaling, cell selection, shared medium — that any interconnected organ model has to solve. PWS-on-Chip is the applied continuation of that work. See Publications.