The Cellbox Labs organ-on-a-chip is a plastic chip, inside of which tiny microchannels sit one atop the other. One channel replicates blood vessels and the other tissue. Between them, a layer of porous membrane mimics the body’s membranes.
The Cellbox Labs team is currently working on an intestine-on-a-chip and lungs-on-a-chip and plans to continue with the liver, brain, and heart in the future. This futuristic technology has several potential applications. One is drug discovery. Currently, this is a costly, time-consuming, and failure-prone endeavor involving animals whose internal systems do not fully represent the human body.
With three co-founders – Artūrs Ābols, Gatis Mozoļevskis, and Roberts Rimša – Cellbox Labs’ core team combines scientific backgrounds with business experience. The startup dates back to 2019, when the Latvian Biomedical Research and Study Centre (BMC) started collaborating with the Institute of Solid State Physics at the University of Latvia (ISSP). The BMC was working on cancer biomarkers and had heard of organs-on-a-chip, which coincided nicely with the ISSP’s expertise in microfluidics, which is vital for producing such chips. Since then, Cellbox Labs has gone on to win grants and competitions.
