Visikol
End-to-End Tissue Imaging and Analysis

Drug discovery and development are complex areas of research. Their combined importance—coupled with the need to bring new products to market quickly—force pharma companies to increasingly outsource critical functions. Many aspects of research are delegated to Contract Research Organizations (CROs), who consist of experts in drug discovery, assay design, histopathology, and genetics. As a CRO specializing in drug discovery solutions—including 3D cell culture assays and tissue imaging—Visikol steps in to provide a portfolio of drug discovery, pre-clinical and clinical research services for its clients. With their multiplex immunofluorescence imaging platform, Visikol is making a tremendous impact in cancer research, drug development, and diagnostics.

Founded in 2016, Visikol is the brainchild of co-founders Tom Villani and Michael Johnson, who had worked together at Rutgers University. At Rutgers, Villani developed the clearing reagent technology, now known as Visikol HISTO, used for 3D bio-imaging, which he and Johnson commercialized through founding Visikol. Over the last several years, the company has developed myriad technologies to advance bioimaging for drug discovery, preclinical, and clinical research. With an increase in demand for high content screening and 3D cell culture models in drug screening,the company has since experiencedan explosion of demand for their research services.

In late 2020, Visikol introduced a new technology platform for multiplex immunohistochemistry: multi-round multiplex immunofluorescence.Such capabilities allowthem to label histological image sections with eight or more antibodies on a single tissue slide. “Our multiplex imaging platform has big implications for pre-clinical drug discovery and clinical trials for immunotherapies, and soon will be important to clinical diagnostics,” mentions Tom Villani, Chief Science Officer of Visikol.

With its technology, Visikol’s team has brought a significant breakthrough in modern cancer research. In cancer therapy, it is critical to understand how the body’s immune system responds during a tumor's development.

Our multiplex imaging platform has big implications for pre-clinical drug discovery and clinical trials for immunotherapies, and soon will be important to clinical diagnostics

Differences in the immune systems between patients can account for significant variation in the outcome and treatment regimens. Consequently, profiling the immune cells that surround the tumor is critical to understanding patient response to therapy. While conventional immunohistochemistry limits the profiling of immune cells to one to three targets per slide, Visikol’s technique offers a way to profile eight or more antibodies in a single slide. As many existing approaches to immune profiling rely on proprietary antibodies, which are expensive, or require custom equipment, the company provides an end-to-end solution for customers. “With our service, customers can send us the sample to perform immune profiling, and we provide them with a comprehensive report and a portal to view the multiplex image data through our web app ‘BitSlide^™’. With BitSlide, customers can view the slides and interact with the data,” says Villani. The Visikol team is currently developing this technique towards applications in toxicology, liver disease, and neuroscience.

This new technique is already having an impact on medical research. In one instance, Visikol has partnered with Hackensack Meridian Health’s Center for Discovery and Innovation (HMH-CDI)who is developing therapeutics for treating tuberculosis. The client wanted to profile the immune cells comprehensively. Before bringing Visikol on board, the client had been performing immune profiling manually by observing hundreds of images, which was expensive and time-consuming. With their technology, Visikol generated a dataset that accurately traced the immune cells and identified which immune cells responded to the drug and evaluated relationships between immune cell populations. This data was used to help select drug candidates which can better treat chronic tuberculosis.

Such success stories result from Visikol’s team's expertise, who go above and beyond to eliminate bottlenecks associated with drug discovery. The company hires candidates with doctorates and post-doc degrees in biological sciences as principal scientists. They also use a team of biologists, biomedical engineers, chemists, and computer scientists who are experts in their respective fields to facilitate their service offerings.

Moving ahead, Visikol plans to continue to expand its tissue imaging services to further support clinical trials, and eventually into clinical diagnostics. They are currently working on a signal amplification technique that can make the imaging process simpler for more challenging targets. The company is also working to improve throughput and its computational image processing pipeline by integrating the data generated with AI and machine learning tools.