A local biotech company has created a new unit of its contract research organization services business.
DiscoveryBioMed launched Sentirix, a unit based on the company’s continuing five-year collaboration with the Philadelphia-based Monell Chemical Senses Center. The unit will be located in Birmingham. According to the company, future labs for studies and chemistry are envisioned but details are not available yet.
According to DiscoveryBioMed CEO Dr. Erik Schwiebert, the name Sentirix is derived from the Latin word sentire, meaning to feel in a sensory way. The unit plans to provide the most relevant model of human taste sensory pathways for the purpose of understanding taste sensations as well as characterizing tasting profiles of pharmaceuticals and food ingredients. The unit plans to use taste bud platform technology developed by DiscoeveryBioMed, from prior work at Monell and licensed from them, to work on the development of niche human cell platform technologies.
“These primary and immortal hTBEC (human taste bud epithelial cell) culture platforms are remarkably easy to grow, expand into larger numbers for medium-throughput screening, and respond functionally to many different types of taste stimuli,” said Dr. Grace Salzer, senior scientist and business development specialist at DiscoveryBioMed. “We believe we have developed a technology that both the food, beverage and flavor industry sectors and Biopharmaceutical drug developers will have significant interest in utilizing for multiple applications pertaining to taste.”
The company said it already has established proof-of-concept of the cell platforms that can be used to mask the bitter taste of biopharmaceutical medicines.