AVA™ Emulation System by Emulate | SLAS 2026 New Product Award Winner

In this episode, we're joined by Lorna Ewart, PhD, CSO of Emulate, to discuss the company's SLAS 2026 New Product Award-winning product: AVA™ Emulation System. AVA™ is a self-contained, benchtop organ-on-a-chip platform that runs 96 chips simultaneously.

Lorna shares how the device was developed and its impact on drug discovery and organ-on-a-chip technology. 

Key Learning Points:

• Development of the AVA emulation system
• Applications of the AVA platform in drug discovery
• Impact of organ-on-a-chip technology on biomedical research

About Emulate
Emulate, Inc. is the pioneer of Organ-on-a-Chip technology, enabling researchers to accurately replicate human tissue function and disease biology through next generation in vitro models. From target discovery to IND submission, Emulate aims to ignite a new era in human health research—one that reduces animal testing, cuts drug development costs, and accelerates the delivery of life-saving treatments. Emulate’s Organ-Chip platforms, consumables, and organ models help the world’s leading pharmaceutical, biotech, and academic teams generate human-relevant data that advance safer, more effective therapies.

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About SLAS
SLAS (Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening) is an international professional society of academic, industry and government life sciences researchers and the developers and providers of laboratory automation technology. The SLAS mission is to bring together researchers in academia, industry and government to advance life sciences discovery and technology via education, knowledge exchange and global community building.

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Transcript

Emily Yamasaki (00:03)

Hello and welcome to the new matter the SLAS podcast. I'm your host Emily Yamasaki and today I'm joined by Lorna Ewart CSO at Emulate who are one of the SLAS 2026 new product award winners Lorna. Welcome to the podcast.

Lorna (00:16)

Thanks, Emily. Thanks for having us.

Emily Yamasaki (00:18)

So congratulations to you and your team on the win. ⁓ Could you just start us off by giving a really quick overview of what it is that Emulate does as a company?

Lorna (00:26)

Yeah, I'm happy to do that. So, Emulate is a company who are leading what's known as organ on a chip development. for those who are less familiar, it's a way of culturing cells in vitro and using microfluidics and also where appropriate mechanical stretch as well. So, what we're really trying to do is model the simple functional units of organs and

create an environment for cells within our chip devices to thrive so they can feel like they're in vivo in the body and therefore the idea being if they think that they're in an environment that's familiar to them they will respond to drugs, to external stimuli in a way that we would expect to see that occur in the body and ultimately for scientists that means that the data should carry greater translational value.

and particularly for obviously drug discoverers and developers, they want greater confidence when they move that candidate from the preclinical stage into the clinical stage.

Emily Yamasaki (01:32)

Thank you. The SLAS New Product Award recognizes new products showcased on the SLAS exhibition floor, and some of the judging criteria include technical merit, commercial feasibility, impact and originality of the product, as well as proof of concept and market opportunity. So could you just tell us about your winning product, the AVA emulation System?

Lorna (01:51)

Yeah, before maybe we jump into AVA, it might be appropriate just to give a little bit more context on what Emulate do and actually the path to the AVA instrument being designed and developed. ⁓ It doesn't really happen overnight as you can imagine with these types of instruments. So Emulate was actually a spin out organization from Harvard, from the Wyss Institute within Harvard. The Wyss Institute is an institute for

biologically inspired engineering. actually that's really all, you know, what's how we think about Oregon chips. It's a combination of both ⁓ engineering and biology, as I explained before, about having that dynamic nature to the culture. And so when the scientists who founded Emulate and Professor Don Ingber, who's the scientific founder of Emulate, were working on this concept.

they were working on chips that don't actually look too similar to ones that are commercially available today. But it was a very laborious process and involved a lot of tubing. So tubing for the media to flow through the channels and also tubing for the vacuum stretch. So unique to our platform is an ability to stretch certain cells. So if you're at the alveolus in the lung, for example, you would be experiencing

pressure changes and mechanical forces every time you take a breath in and take a breath out. And we wanted to recreate that on the chip. And of course, the team did that rather successfully and published a paper in Science, which is, I guess, one of the leading publications in the organ on a chip Her et al. in Science 2010. But the throughput here was really low.

As I said, there was a lot of tubing, so that's not great for drug discoverers and developers because they need more drug, for example, to access the platform. The drug can stick to tubing, for instance. There's bubbles, you know, that's one of the challenges with microfluidics. And when Emulate spun out, really the res and detra of spinning it out was to create a product that could start to democratize the technology. And so in order for us to achieve that,

Zoë instrument was formed. So Zoë is our first platform. So Zoë took all of the design principles that Dan Ha had used in his original publication. But one of the key steps forward was that they removed all of the tubing. So there's a pressure driven flow associated. And so that removes some of the barriers that I described previously. When the scientists at the Wyss were doing this, we'd probably run about six chips at any one time.

Zoë was actually able to run 12, so we saw a significant improvement with the formation of Zoë. But as you know, if cells are going to be in an environment like the body, they need to be at 37 degrees, they need to have the correct degree of oxygenation, there's humidity to stop them drying out, for example. So to overcome those challenges, the Zoë was actually placed inside an incubator as well.

Emily Yamasaki (04:55)

Mm-hmm.

Lorna (04:57)

So that product still exists today, it sells very well. We have over 600 in the field right now. And the advantage of that for us as product developers was really to learn some of the ⁓ operational challenges that still existed. So for example, people told us they would prefer even more throughput. They wanted a simpler workflow, so less ⁓ manual time in the lab if possible.

And because once it's a zoo inside an incubator, if you know the size of an incubator, you have to start taking up a lot of lab footprint. So there was also this question about how could we, you know, miniaturize or reduce the size of the footprint in a laboratory as well. And aside from those drivers, there were other drivers around, of course, wanting to know the biology was reproducible and the instrument would be robust and reliable. So all of those things fed into AVA.

So what is AVA then? What won the new product award? So AVA addresses a number of those operational challenges. So for instance, AVA's now a higher throughput organ chip platform. So AVA's now able to run what we call 96 emulations. So that's 96 organ chips at any one time. She's also a self-contained instrument. So she'll sit on the bench top.

She's about 110 pounds in weight, just to give folks an idea of that. And so therefore she's able to contain the humidity, the temperature and the carbon dioxide. And thinking about the user requirement, obviously with throughput sometimes can come more user input, but we've designed AVA with automation in mind. So for example, the new consumable is on a standard laboratory SBS format.

and it can be handled by automated liquid handler arms, or just automated arms, I should say, to remove those consumables from the instrument. It is compatible with liquid handlers for taking off effluents for measurements, for example. But importantly, the last feature of Eva is that she also has an embedded microscope. So that microscope is able to take images of the cells

underflow. So first of its kind really at that scale, it's on a phase contrast as well as has three fluorescent filters. So this really cuts down a lot of the lab time for users as well. They're not having to manually take the chip out of the instrument over to the microscope, find the focal plane, take their fields of view and then go back and on repeat. So

AVA comes with some software that allows those images to be stored in a very ⁓ user friendly fashion, making the analysis of the quality control at the beginning of an experiment much, much simpler than it perhaps would have been in normal circumstances.

Emily Yamasaki (07:48)

That's fantastic being able to increase your throughput without having to provide more incubator space and then also increasing that functionality. That sounds like a exciting development for the product and for the user as well. So you made all of these kind of updates based from the Zoe instrument that you described.

What are some of the applications that these updates facilitate?

Lorna (08:09)

so the way that we often describe Zöe is that Zöe is what we call an open platform for biology and what we really mean by that, that the chips that we use, the consumables that we use inside Zöe, they are agnostic to cell type. So we and others have shown that you can have animal cells there, you can have human primary cells there, stem cells, even cell lines.

And in fact, actually, we have a nice protocol that takes organoids and puts them also on the chip so you can get the best of both types of technology there. And so that concept is still true with AVA. We use a slightly different material for AVA. It's a minimally drug absorbing plastic. But nonetheless, all of the biology that one can enable on the Zöe platform should transition onto the AVA platform.

So when we think about our applications on Zöe what we call our leading or our flagship application is actually our liver chip application. So in 2022, we published a paper in Communications Medicine that tested 27 small molecule drugs and showed that the sensitivity for predicting drug-induced liver injury was 87% and our specificity was 100%. So this

gave us a degree of unprecedented performance for that prediction of that type of biology and actually allowed us to enter into the FDA ISTAND qualification program. So there's been a lot discussed in the last 12 months. In fact, we're coming up to the 12 month anniversary of the FDA announcement that they wanted to encourage people to move towards human relevant technologies like organ and chip to reduce animals.

within the next three to five years. So we're thrilled to be part of that program. So what we've done is we've given this as a new instrument and given that we know a lot about liver and how it should be performing with our first application on the AVA platform is also a liver platform. And while I was at SLAS I was able to present some of the biology data there. And actually it was received really well because

we were able to show that our arrangement maintains the flow rates within a 5% coefficient of variation. So that gives the user confidence that emulation one, if you like, is going to be a similar, if not identical, to emulation 96 when it comes to thinking about the flow rate. And we were also able to show that across a smaller set of small molecule drugs, we could still pick up the drugs that are known to be hepatotoxic.

and ones that were not known to be hepatotoxic. But I think that the piece of the biology that ⁓ I was happiest the most with is that we were able to place our instrument in an external laboratory and get them to also run the same experiment. And looking across three different days ⁓ to look at the reduction in albumin, which is a measure, if you will, of the hepatotoxicity, we can drive IC50s.

And the IC50s that we generated internally and those generated in the external lab were practically identical. So that gives us, a lot of hope that that biology is robust, it's able to translate into other users' hands, but also able to still have that same fidelity scale as well. And lastly, and very importantly,

what we've been able to show with the biology, at least with the liver chip to detect drug-induced liver injury. Again, depending if you want to look at 24 hours after exposure or up to seven days after exposure to a drug, we're looking at three to four emulations per group to have an 80% confidence with the 95% statistical limit or P equal, less than 0.05.

to gain that statistical significance. So again, being able to articulate ⁓ that the biology is there at scale, it is reproducible, and actually now comes into a realm where people can confidently use it within their drug development workflows.

Emily Yamasaki (12:22)

Great, that's great to have that proof of concept and also to kind of verify that with an external lab as well. That's exciting. Is there a specific user or sector that the product is ideal for?

Lorna (12:32)

Yes, we designed the product mainly with the pharma companies in mind. And so we know that, you know, pharma have engaged with these technologies from an early age. fact, prior employer was AstraZeneca and I got involved in this technology when I was there. And so I think, you know, the academic fields and subsequently some pharma, shouldn't reel them out, have shown, you know, many,

beautiful publications that these platforms will produce highly relevant biology and we often call it clinical mimicry. So, you know, they've been engaged in that for a long time, but, you know, they're not still using it routinely in their own.

everyday workflows and some of that is from the challenges I mentioned before about the throughput and needing to know that it was robust reliable instrumentation demonstration that the biology was reproducible cost is a consideration too and we've been able to reduce the cost per chip in this instrument significantly actually and so the chips are smaller by 50 percent so take fewer cells less media

And we've worked with external manufacturers who drive that cost down as well. we're targeting them. We've listened to where some of their challenges are. What they really want now, though, you know, bringing back that regulatory piece as well. You know, understanding that there's some external validation by the regulators will be helpful and building out, as we will continue to do, more exemplars of how relevant the biology is, of course, is going to help them.

However, we've not forgotten about other customers. So we know that academics are interested in this. In fact, we have made a sale to an academic institution. And they're seeing this as an institutional purchase because you don't have to run all eight, you know, if you run eight consumables, they don't all have to be the same thing. ⁓ The only thing at the moment in our first release here,

is the flow rates need to be the same. So you could run two different organs if the flow rates are the same. And so that means that they can have multiple users use the same instrument. And back to that lab footprint, you know, we've shrunk it so much that they don't need ancillary microscopes or ⁓ incubators as well to manage with the instrument. So, pharma primarily, academics have not forgotten about.

And we are hopeful with all of the interest from government agencies, the NIH and spearheading a lot of research and funding, of course, in this space, that other agencies will be able to acquire these instruments in due course as well.

Emily Yamasaki (15:16)

Yeah, it's great having that flexibility to run multiple organ systems on there. think makes it a great fit for things like core facilities, that kind of thing where you're looking for an instrument that can be shared.

Lorna (15:24)

Absolutely.

Emily Yamasaki (15:27)

So you've talked a little bit about kind of the development of the product and your kind of predecessor product to this, to AVA How does this product in the AVA system compare to the industry standard?

Lorna (15:38)

Yes, I think in terms of the throughput of a microfluidic instrument, I think that's first in class there really. you know, of course we do monitor a lot of our competitors and we know that other competitors can have a, and again, I'm being very specific here about microfluidic competitors, you know, some of the organoid acids, et cetera, of course can go to higher throughput than we can.

at this moment, but yeah, they're running around somewhere between 24 through to about 72 emulations. When we were thinking about throughput, we wanted a number that kind of chimed, know, 96 well played. Of course, many listeners will be familiar with that. So that, course, was a target. But importantly, when we were thinking about throughput,

And we wanted to make sure we were not losing any of our biological fidelity. So in other words, we can still remove cells at the end of an experiment and have sufficient levels of RNA to put through a standard transcriptomic analysis and an instrument that would help us do our transcriptomic analysis. And our effluent collection still has the sensitivity to work with standard ELISA kits, for example, if you're looking at biomarker release. So those things were important to us.

There are one or two fluidic platforms that are at a very high scale in the sort of tens of thousands, but their inputs are often limited to imaging inputs. Nothing wrong with that. But you'd lose that functionality, let's understand that there might have to be some pooling of effluents to get a biochemical readout. So in terms of throughput, I think this is very competitive.

And I think the other really competitive thing for me, again, coming back to this is an all in one system. It's got its microscope there, but it's also a temperature and humidity and CO2 controlled environment. So it is standalone. And I think just even going around SLAS, know, seeing some of the other standard laboratory instruments, that's the direction of travel. And that's what, you know, users are wanting to see. And so it's cleaner and simpler and it feels all together in one place.

Those things I think are stand out right now. But yeah, I'm sure others will be hot on the heels.

Emily Yamasaki (17:55)

And so you also mentioned that AVA is designed with automation in mind as well. Could you talk a little bit about how the product can elevate or advance the field of lab automation and screening?

Lorna (18:06)

Absolutely. as I said, everything that we thought about with AVA, so right down to the buttons, there's four buttons on the front which open the doors where the consumer bill sits. Those are automation friendly. So we thought very much, how are we going to fit this into a laboratory workflow? And we are not experts in lab automation, nor are we experts in liquid handling, for example.

when we were thinking about the design of the instrument, we wanted to make those agnostic to those other components such that when a user was buying it, if they want to place it into not dissimilar to the sort of the lab cubes that you hear, that Ginkgo have really been pushing. In fact, they had a fantastic display at the SLAS there.

we wanted to make sure that we would fit well within those parameters. we've thought about it, say, from the instrument, from the consumable, but also to make it agnostic, because we don't want to be prescriptive to our user and say, will only work with this type of robotic system. Because then that is potentially limiting.

Emily Yamasaki (19:11)

So last question for me, what does winning the new product award mean for you and for your team?

Lorna (19:15)

you we were thrilled to get the new product award. And I think firstly and foremost, it's a real, really a meaningful external validation for the team. The team have been working enormously hard, especially in the last 12 to 18 months. And actually, probably the project goes back to about three years ago. So to see this actually, first of all, come to life as a real instrument and then win the product award.

And that is fantastic for all of the engineers and the biologists that were involved in bringing it to this point. But I think beyond that external validation, it's a real turning point in the field. this we were lucky to launch it last year and that the NPS Society, their annual meeting in Brussels last year. And we couldn't have predicted we were going to launch it in the year where it all these regulatory policy changes as well.

So I think it really makes a statement about the maturity of the field and is a turning point in the field that we can now get biology to scale. We can do it reproducibly. We can do it reliably. We can do it in an automated fashion if that's what a user wants. So all of those things to be acknowledged by something like the SLAS, it's just really gratifying for us all.

Hopefully that's another step towards democratisation as well.

Emily Yamasaki (20:36)

Well, Lorna, thank you so much for joining me today. It's been great to chat with you and I look forward to seeing what the future holds for Emulate.

Lorna (20:42)

Thanks, Emily. Thanks for having us.