#HERchanger Founder Feature: Cinzia Silvestri
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We’re so honored to be introducing Cinzia Silvestri, today’s featured SheTransacts community member and female founder, and CEO of Bi/ond. She resides in South Holland, Netherlands and shares with us her world-changing company.
What world-changing problems are you solving?
Bi/ond is empowering biological innovation by engineering microchips through nourishing, stimulating and monitoring cells. We are all unique in different ways, yet modern treatments ignore individual’s genetic variations. Bi/ond is improving medical treatment of millions of patients by providing innovative hardware solutions for enabling biomedical research, which reflects our natural bio diversity.
How can we do that? By facing two main challenges:
- 9 out of 10 drugs in development fail in clinical trials
2. Drugs are often tested on one type of person that is normally male and normally white.
Thanks to our solution we can solve the following SDG goals:
Reduced price of therapies: therapies are pricey because of the costs (and risks) to develop them. Our technology will reduce such costs, and consequently, those of the healthcare system. Moreover, our product can be mass-produced, so it is not an elitist technology, but it will be accessible for all (Goal 10);
We partnered with top European hospitals to improve patient well-being and step the way towards personalized medicine approaches (Goal 3);
Women, minorities are vastly underrepresented in clinical trials. Enabling research based on their tissues helps increasing data availability. This is the topic of my TedX titled “Your drugs are average” (Goal 5 and Goal 10)
Fewer animal studies: Over 100M animals are used in lab testing. Our solution can drastically decrease them. Moreover, we are a strong advocate for animal reduction. We recently launched the OOCTransition initiative supported by more than 10 international animal associations. One of our-co-founder also won the Lush Price in 2018 for his effort in reducing animal use. (Goal 14 and Goal 15)
What is so unique about this solution?
The tools for developing drugs are not good enough. Biologists use: cell in plastic dishes, but your body is not static and flat; or animal models, but it is not always possible to compare us with animals.
It would be ideal to have in a biological lab a tool similar to a human body.
We develop that tool. It is a computer chip where biologists can insert human cells. Like the human body, the chip nourishes, stimulates and monitors those cells.
Right now, we developed a happily beating human heart tissue in our chip. The heart tissue can be the one of each of us, going towards INCLUSIVE and PRECISE drugs for all. We have been developing this with the KOL in the cardiac stem cells. We are now starting to test drugs in it.
Why is this important to you?
Is our uniqueness considered when developing new drugs, new therapies? When running clinical trials to evaluate the safety and efficacy of medicine that we will all take?
Not really.
One thing is if we are talking about over-the-counter drugs that people use, common medicine for common issue; but what if is not a common issue? What if someone has a degenerative heart disease or somebody is dying of cancer. Those are times when you don’t want average treatments. You want to be sure that treatment is suited for you.
We need inclusion and precision in medicine, not averages.
So here is what I asked myself: what can I do to improve inclusion and precision, particularly when it is about cancer and when it is about heart disease? I felt the need to do something to help include diversity and precision in medicine.
I’m an engineer, I can’t enroll more women and minorities in clinical trials, I can’t make new regulations. Pharma companies, clinicians, policymakers will handle this.
But there is something that as an engineer I can do. That’s why two close friends and I found Bi/ond, our start-up. In Bi/ond, our diverse team, developed a tool that can include our uniqueness. As a microelectronics engineer, that tool couldn’t be different than what we were used to — a computer chip — where biologists can insert human cells. Those cells can be of a man, of a woman, of different races. This will help in having new inclusive averages, including diversity aspects already when developing new drugs.
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