Most drug discovery research still relies on cells and tissue grown in a dish that sits still. The human body doesn't work like that. In this edition of our Spotlight On series, we look at Vitroscope, a Norwegian company our team will be seeing at Biomarkers, CDx & Precision Medicine Europe in Basel on 13 to 14 October.
Vitroscope is working on a practical question: how do you keep living human tissue outside the body in conditions that resemble the body?
Why static cell culture falls short
In the body, tissue is never still. Fluid flows past it, oxygen levels change, and nutrients and waste are exchanged all the time. Most lab models are grown in static conditions. Recreating flow in the lab has usually been fiddly, time-consuming and hard to standardise. Vitroscope's founders started from a simple point: if biology moves, the conditions used to study it should move too. Their aim was to make controlled, repeatable perfusion workable in an ordinary lab.
How the perfusion platform works
Vitroscope was set up in Trondheim in 2019 and has staff in Norway, Sweden and Finland. Its main product is an automated perfusion platform controlled by software. The system pumps a steady flow of fluid around the sample. This brings in fresh nutrients, carries away waste and puts the tissue under the kind of shear forces it would meet in the body.
Each condition is set in software. Built-in sensors track pH and oxygen as the experiment runs, temperature is controlled within the device, and more sensors are planned. The platform is designed to fit how labs already work:
It runs several experiments side by side in roughly the space of a multi-well plate.
It works with inverted microscopes, so researchers can image samples while the experiment is running.
It can hold living tissue, tissue slices, organoids and engineered models.
Vitroscope makes the hardware, sensors and software itself, and works with researchers to build and test applications for specific types of biology.
What sets Vitroscope apart
Flow, not static culture. Constant perfusion keeps the sample fed and clears waste. The flow itself also affects how cells behave, through shear stress and other mechanical forces.
Conditions matched to the tissue. Settings can be adjusted for the type of tissue being studied, so each model sits closer to its normal environment.
Living tissue slices. The platform can keep intact slices of living tissue, as well as organoids and engineered models used in NAMs and screening.
A full record of every run. Sensor readings are logged throughout each experiment, and imaging shows how the sample changes over time.
Protocols that travel. Vitroscope's browser-based software, vitro.cloud, stores each protocol digitally. The same setup can be run on other instruments or at other sites, which should mean less variation between labs.
Published work so far
Year: 2025
Model: Vascularised human brain organoids (with CONDUCTink)
What the work showed: Perfusion kept running for seven days, with fluorescent beads tracked moving through the organoids' CD31-positive blood vessel network.
Publication: Paone, Jernström et al., white paper
Year: 2025
Model: Living human podocytes
What the work showed: Kidney cells exposed to set levels of shear stress and watched with live-cell imaging
Publication: Lindfors, Schmotz et al., Journal of the American Society of Nephrology
Year: 2024
Model: Sensor-extended imaging
What the work showed: Flow-based culture combined with live-cell imaging and continuous sensor readings
Publication: Schueler, Sjöman & Kriesi, Communications Biology
Year: 2019
Model: Flow-based cell culture
What the work showed: A flow chamber that held temperature and shear stress steady while cells were imaged
Publication: Kriesi et al., Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology
Work is also under way on ex vivo tissue culture, with the goal of keeping the tissue's natural structure intact over longer studies.
Working with partners
Vitroscope isn't trying to build every part of the research process itself. It concentrates on the experimental environment and works with other companies for omics, spatial analysis and AI. One example is an ovarian cancer NAM project with CubaseBio, MedInsights, Karolinska Institutet, Charles River Laboratories and PSC Biotech Corporation. The workflow runs like this:
Living tissue is collected.
Vitroscope keeps it under controlled perfusion and tests how it responds to drugs.
Partners map the tissue's response using 3D spatial transcriptomics.
Computational modelling analyses the results.
The team gets a view of drug response across several layers of biology.
Each partner handles one part of the workflow. Vitroscope's job is keeping the tissue in controlled conditions while the rest happens.
Why it matters for drug discovery
Labs can now produce huge amounts of molecular, spatial and computational data from a single sample. But that data is only useful if the tissue it came from behaved like tissue in the body.
If living human tissue can be kept in more realistic conditions, monitored over time and then analysed with spatial biology and AI, preclinical results should be closer to what happens in patients. Keeping tissue alive for longer is part of it. The bigger aim is getting better results from that tissue.
What it means for hiring
Companies like Vitroscope combine biology, engineering, sensors, software and data. They need people who can work across more than one of those areas, and those people are hard to find. Typical roles include:
Scientists with tissue, organoid or ex vivo culture experience who are comfortable with automated systems and large data sets.
Engineers and software developers who understand how labs run and what regulators expect.
Business development and commercial leaders who can sell technical platforms to pharma, CROs and academic groups.
Senior leaders who have taken a technology company from early testing to full commercial launch.
Pharma companies and CROs bringing in NAM tools need similar mixed skill sets in their own teams. Filling these roles early makes it easier to scale once the technology is ready.
What's next
Vitroscope is getting ready for a wider commercial launch. Until then, it is running more external tests with research and industry users and developing new NAM applications.
At Biomarkers, CDx & Precision Medicine Europe in Basel on 13 to 14 October, the company will present its ovarian cancer NAM project. You can find out more on Vitroscope's website.
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