Australia-based startup Inventia Life Science has partnered with American pharmaceutical firm Merck using Inventia's RASTRUM 3D cell culture platform. Through this collaboration, novel bioprinting capabilities offered by RASTRUM will be utilised to create 3D in vitro models for the preclinical screening of neurodegenerative disease therapeutic candidates.

Inventia's Founder and CEO, Dr Julio Ribeiro said: "By working together, we aim to establish new approaches to drug discovery and create more translatable models which bridge the gap between in vitro and in vivo preclinical studies."

The RASTRUM platform is designed to enable the generation of highly reproducible cell models that closely mimic the human brain. The collaboration aims to accelerate the drug discovery process by evaluating therapeutic candidates on 3D in vitro models of various neurological disorders, including Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease.