Lucero provides assay-ready, thaw-and-dose 3D liver spheroids delivered in a 384-well plate format for high-throughput screening. This platform accelerates early drug discovery by offering predictive in-vitro models that skip over seven days of traditional spheroid culturing. The ready-to-test spheroids enable researchers to achieve faster, more scalable testing closer to in-vivo conditions.
Funding
$100K raised to dateRaised to date based on public sources. This may differ from the amount the company actually raised and is based only on what is publicly available on the internet.
Founders
Product
Problem
Traditional methods of isolating and dispensing 3D cell cultures, specifically spheroids, for drug testing are often manual, inconsistent, and not scalable, hindering pharmaceutical companies from conducting comprehensive efficacy and toxicity assessments. This limitation leads to increased clinical failures and higher costs in drug development due to inaccurate early-stage testing.
Solution
Lucero provides a precision 3D cell culture handling platform that automates the isolation and dispensing of individual spheroids, enabling pharmaceutical companies to perform more accurate and scalable drug testing. The platform utilizes microfluidics and AI-driven quality control to selectively isolate and dispense spheroids into assay-ready plates. This automated process reduces human intervention, minimizes variability, and ensures high-throughput, reproducible results. Lucero's technology facilitates the transition from traditional 2D hepatocyte models to more physiologically relevant 3D models, accelerating the development of personalized drugs and treatments while reducing clinical failures.
Target Audience
Lucero's primary customers are pharmaceutical companies and research scientists involved in early-stage drug discovery, toxicology, and personalized medicine, seeking to improve the accuracy and efficiency of their 3D cell culture-based assays.
Features
- Automated isolation and dispensing of individual spheroids using a precision 3D cell culture handling platform
- Assay-ready plates preloaded with 384 fully formed 3D tissue constructs
- Microfluidics technology for precise spheroid selection and dispensing
- AI-driven quality control for maximum batch-to-batch uniformity and spheroid qualification
- Compatibility with existing workflows, eliminating the need for new equipment
- Cryopreserved liver spheroids that transition from freezer to assay in under 24 hours
- Capability to populate 100% of wells with viable and uniform spheroids