Visikol partners with MatTek to leverage their advanced cell culture models in its suite of drug discovery services

Over the last two months, both MatTek and Visikol have been acquired by CELLINK, the world’s leading bioconvergence company. CELLINK is focused on bringing together, the technologies, products, services, and people required to create the future of medicine. Together, MatTek and Visikol bring significant experience with providing researchers best-in-class in vitro models and services for evaluating the safety, efficacy and pharmacokinetics of therapeutics and personal care products. Today, the two companies are announcing that Visikol will now be leveraging the MatTek portfolio of advanced cell culture models within its drug discovery services.

Over the last three years, Visikol has built out a robust portfolio of liver cell culture assays (DILI, NASH, NAFLD) as well as a diverse portfolio of cancer 3D cell culture assays which have allowed the company to provide its clients with in vitro solutions for a wide range of different research questions. In providing these solutions to its clients, Visikol always works to balance throughput, cost and the required level of in vivo relevancy such that every assay meets a client’s specific research requirements.

In working to meet the needs of its clients, Visikol noticed a gap for models and assays within the epithelial space (i.e., models that mimic tissues at the surface of the body) such that Visikol was unable to meet the needs of clients looking to address research questions regarding these tissues. During this same time, MatTek has become the industry leader in the epithelial model space and provides researchers around the world with tissue models, primary cells, media and culture wear as well as toxicology services.

Going forward, Visikol will leverage MatTek’s extensive portfolio of advanced cell culture models which include airway, skin, cornea, and intestinal models. These human derived models provide a highly relevant and affordable solution for evaluating drug toxicity, pharmacokinetics and modeling a wide range of diseases. These models will be a bolt on addition to Visikol’s in vitro contract research services which include end-to-end study design and execution with readouts including high content imaging, histology, multiplex immunofluorescence imaging, qPCR, ELISA, HPLC and LCMS.

“We were very excited to join the CELLINK family of companies and saw an immediate synergy with MatTek given their expertise in providing epithelial models and our strengths in executing drug discovery services but lacking a portfolio of validated and commercially available epithelial models to use in our services,” described Visikol CEO Michael Johnson, PhD. These new assay services will be available immediately to Visikol’s clients and will not only leverage the MatTek models but the thirty years of collective expertise of the MatTek team in this field.

"As sister companies under CELLINK, we have the opportunity to support our respective customer bases and work together to expand our synergistic technologies and offerings," said Kevin Causey, MatTek's Vice President of Business Development. "We're always glad to lend our expertise in support of our mission to advance and expand the use of in vitro methods and we look forward to partnering with Visikol to supplement their testing offerings."

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The information was submitted for publication, through the agency of the contact persons set out above, on July 6, 2021, at 15:00 (CEST).

About CELLINK
Founded in 2016, CELLINK is the leading bioconvergence company in the world that provides technologies, products and services to create, understand and master biology. With a focus on the application areas of bioprinting, multiomics, cell line development, and diagnostics, the company develops and markets innovative technologies that enable researchers in the life sciences to culture cells in 3D, perform high-throughput drug screening and print human tissues and organs for the medical, pharmaceutical, and cosmetic industries. CELLINK’s products are trusted by more than 2,000 laboratories, including ones at all the top 20 pharmaceutical companies, are being used in more than 65 countries, and have been cited in more than 1,700 publications. CELLINK is creating the future of medicine. CELLINK is listed on the Nasdaq the Stockholm under CLNK B. www.cellink.com  

About Visikol
Visikol is a contract research services company that is focused on accelerating drug discovery and development through the use of its imaging, digital pathology and advanced cell culture assay services. The company provides end-to-end preclinical services that include both 2D and 3D in vitro models and assays, 3D whole mount tissue imaging, multiplex imaging, high content imaging, digital pathology, and custom drug discovery solutions. Visikol’s expertise is in transforming tissues and cells into large image-based data sets that can be mined for actionable insights such that pharmaceutical and biotech companies can make more quantitative and informed decision during the drug development process. Additionally, Visikol manufactures and sells a suite of tissue clearing reagents and 3D immuno-labelling kits. These products allow researchers to easily and rapidly image whole tissues and 3D cell culture models in 3D instead of traditional 2D sectioning. For more information about Visikol or its services, please visit www.visikol.com

About MatTek
MatTek was founded in 1985 and began producing human tissue models as reliable replacements for animal testing. MatTek’s skin, ocular, oral, respiratory, and intestinal tissue models are used to assess safety and efficacy throughout the pharmaceutical, cosmetics, personal care, and household product industries. These advanced tissue models empower companies to achieve their goals of non-animal testing while lowering testing costs and providing human-relevant results. The company has expanded its offerings to include cultureware, primary human cells and media, 3Diy kits, and testing services in support of its mission to advance innovative in vitro science through the production of synergistic life science products and services. www.mattek.com

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