Our History

Martina Brofiga, Marietta Pisano, and Francesca Callegari, three bioengineers, Ph.D. students in Bioengineering and Robotics, presented their start-up idea (ScreenNeuroPharm) at the SMARTcup Liguria 2020 and START CUP UNIGE 2020. On 29th October, the ScreenNeuroPharm's innovative idea allowed to win:

• The first absolute prize.
• The first prize in the “Life Science” category.
• The first prize in START CUP UNIGE 2020.
• Audience Award.
• EBN Award.
• InnoEU Award.
• Associazione Culturale Sintesi Award.
• MGMP AVVOCATI Award.
• FIDAPA Genova 2 Award.
• Lega Coop Liguria Award

Briefly, ScreenNeuroPharm has the mission of designing, manufacturing, validating, and marketing devices for the engineering of in vitro cell cultures capable of emulating physiology in vivo to:

1. improve the standards of reliability and efficiency of laboratory and pharmaceutical tests,
2. experiment with innovative therapeutic approaches as well,
3. reduce animal testing

ScreenNeuroPharm's products allow the creation of three-dimensional cultures and guarantee modular connectivity and heterogeneity, fundamental characteristics of in vivo systems, and especially the nervous system. These models will make it possible to raise the qualitative standards of pharmacological tests. Nowadays, drug trial is performed on two-dimensional and homogeneous cellular preparations, characteristics far from in vivo environment. Therefore, the effects of the drug are often underestimated or overestimated, leading to distorted if not incorrect information. In addition to the hardware component, ScreenNeuroPharm offers a software package for the acquired data's statistical analysis.