BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Emulate, Inc., today announced the official opening of its new headquarters and laboratories in Boston’s Seaport District, at 27 Drydock Avenue within The Innovation and Design Building. The new facility will be a workplace for the company’s 40 employees, with plans for expansion to 85 employees within the coming year.
Coming just 18 months after Emulate’s launch, the opening and scale-up of this new 20,000 square-foot expanded headquarters provides state-of-the-art laboratories and facilities to support commercial activities, product development, and collaborative research programs for the Organs-on-Chips technology. The new operations will facilitate the next stage of evolution as Emulate moves towards industry launch of its proprietary Organ-Chips within an automated Human Emulation System. This pioneering work to create a plug-and-play system with lab-ready Organ-Chips, instrumentation and software allows Emulate to offer a system that supports more effective innovation, design and safety of products across a range of industries, including pharmaceuticals, agriculture, cosmetics, chemical-based consumer products and precision medicine.
“I congratulate Emulate on opening their new headquarters in Boston’s Seaport District which continues to attract leading-edge technology companies of all kinds and sizes,” said Governor Charlie Baker. “We look forward to Emulate’s contributions to innovation and job creation in the Commonwealth.”
Emulate located its new headquarters to facilitate collaborations within Boston’s biotechnology hub of pharmaceutical and biotech companies who are using the Organs-on-Chips technology to better predict the potential efficacy and safety of drug candidates, and to improve the drug development process. Emulate’s local industry collaborators include pharmaceutical leaders Johnson & Johnson Innovation Center and Merck, as well as academic researchers at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, where the Organs-on-Chips technology was originally incubated until Emulate’s launch in July 2014.
“We are delighted to be a member of Boston’s innovation community, which offers unique opportunities for us to grow within a connected biotechnology and healthcare ecosystem. Making the drug development process more successful, efficient and cost-effective is one of the critical areas for early adopters of the Organs-on-Chips technology because our true-to-life system offers a better way to predict human response with greater precision than today’s cell culture or animal testing methods,” said James Coon, Chief Executive Officer of Emulate. “We have already made rapid progress along our path to commercialize our Organs-on-Chips technology, and in order to reach our full potential we are actively expanding our hiring plans to recruit new talent. Our new headquarters will support our entrepreneurial culture of integrating design, biology and engineering to further develop our Human Emulation System – and to enable a new era of improved products, precision medicine and personalized health applications for patients and consumers.”
Ribbon-cutting ceremony with state and local officials
To celebrate the opening of Emulate’s new facility, a ribbon-cutting ceremony will be held today in collaboration with the Mayor’s Office of the City of Boston and the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center (MLSC).
"Emulate's opening further establishes Boston as a world class city, with top life sciences and biotech companies that are working alongside our hospitals and universities to accelerate new healthcare solutions for our patients," said Mayor Walsh. "I welcome Emulate's headquarters to Boston and look forward to working with the company to continue to strengthen our City's innovation economy."
“We are pleased to celebrate the grand opening of Emulate’s new headquarters and labs in Boston,” said Travis McCready, President & CEO of the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center. “Already, in its first 18 months since launch, Emulate has capitalized on its presence in the Commonwealth’s life sciences ecosystem by establishing impressive collaborations with pharmaceutical partners that have local R&D centers. Emulate’s Organs-on-Chips technology intersects with many of the life sciences areas that MLSC supports, including innovative drug development, neuroscience research and advancing big data technology in healthcare.”
“We are thrilled to celebrate Emulate’s grand opening today in the Seaport life sciences innovation community,” said Robert K. Coughlin, President & CEO of MassBio. “Emulate’s Organs-on-Chips offer a way to radically change the paradigm of drug development. With their innovative technology and their collaborative spirit, we know they will continue to be a very valuable part of the Massachusetts life sciences community and we look forward to their continued growth.”
At the ribbon-cutting ceremony, examples of Emulate’s system will be on display to represent the range of products in the company’s growing portfolio including Lung-Chip, Liver-Chip, Intestine-Chip, Kidney-Chip and Brain-Chip. The chips are comprised of micro-engineered environments lined with living human cells and tissues; each chip recreates the natural physiology and mechanical forces that cells experience within the human body. The Organs-Chips are designed to live within Emulate’s automated Human Emulation System, enabling researchers to conduct experiments that recreate living human biology. Underpinning the system is a software suite that facilitates experimental design and execution, analysis of data and predictive modeling of outcomes to enable products to be aligned with human biology and health.
Organs-on-Chips technology for emulating human biology
Based on the Organs-on-Chips technology, Emulate has created a new living Human Emulation System that provides a real-time window into the inner-workings of human biology and disease, offering researchers a new way to predict human response with greater precision and detail than today’s cell culture or animal-based testing. Each of Emulate’s proprietary Organ-Chips – such as the lung, liver, brain or kidney – contains tiny hollow channels lined with tens of thousands of living human cells and tissues, and is approximately the size of an AA battery. An Organ-Chip is a living, micro-engineered environment that recreates the natural physiology and mechanical forces that cells experience within the human body. The Human Emulation System can link multiple Organ-Chips together to model interactions between different organs and predict whole body or systemic-level responses.
About Emulate, Inc.
Emulate Inc. is a private company that creates living products for understanding how diseases, medicines, chemicals, and foods affect human health. Our Human Emulation System sets a new standard for recreating true-to-life human biology and is being used to advance product innovation, design, and safety across a range of applications including drug development, agriculture, cosmetics, chemical-based consumer products, and personalized health. Emulate continues to develop a wide range of Organ-Chips and disease models through collaborations with industry partners and internal R&D programs. Emulate is also working with clinical partners to produce Organ-Chips personalized with an individual patient’s stem cells for applications in precision medicine and personalized health. Our founding team pioneered the Organs-on-Chips technology at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University. Emulate holds the worldwide exclusive license from Harvard University to a robust and broad intellectual property portfolio for the Organs-on-Chips technology and related systems.
