Roche creates organoid research institute to shake up drug discovery and development
Roche is betting preclinical drug development is on the cusp of a major change. After tracking advances in fields including engineering and computational science, the Swiss drugmaker has set up the Institute of Human Biology (IHB) and asked its staff to collaborate with external partners to create better models.
Today, drug developers rely heavily on animal models to show how a drug candidate is likely to perform in clinical trials, despite knowing that the results can translate poorly into humans. Roche sees human model systems such as organoids as a way to gather data that more accurately predict how patients will respond to a molecule—and thinks now is the right time to place a bigger bet on that idea.
IHB is the new name for Roche’s Institute for Translational Bioengineering, a group the company set up in 2021 to “harness and advance the use of human model systems in drug discovery and development.”
“The work at the IHB has the potential to redefine how we discover and develop medicines over the next decade,” Matthias Lutolf, head IHB at Roche, said in a statement. “The institute is uniquely positioned in bringing together biology, bioengineering and data science around human model systems and applying them to real-world challenges in drug discovery and research.”
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