Hesperos

Hesperos, established in 2015 and headquartered in Orlando, Florida, specializes in the development of Human-on-a-Chip® technology, which is utilized for drug discovery and disease modeling. The company offers custom models incorporating up to five different organ or tissue types, providing pre-clinical insights into the efficacy and off-target toxicity of both single and multi-drug treatments. Hesperos is committed to reducing the need for animal testing by using a serum-free, pumpless platform for its systems, which include models for the heart, liver, neurons, skeletal muscle, kidney, skin, blood-brain barrier, immune system, and gastrointestinal tract. The company employs human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) in its models to enhance the accuracy and relevance of its findings. Hesperos has received significant funding, including a $2 million research grant from the NIH to develop an animal-free Botox testing platform and additional support from NIH’s HEAL initiative for a 5-organ model to study overdose effects. The company has made notable advancements, such as developing the first human model to study opioid overdose and reversal with naloxone, and a functional overdose model published in Advanced Biology. Hesperos has also published a study on Malaria-on-a-Chip in Nature Scientific Reports and developed a human-based model to study malaria and potential therapeutics. The company collaborates with pharmaceutical, cosmetic, and government entities and has published multiple studies in top-tier, peer-reviewed journals. Hesperos enabled the first FDA-authorized human clinical trial using efficacy data exclusively from a microphysiological system and holds a patent on its Human-on-a-Chip technology.