In 2015, Wadah Malaeb was studying tissue engineering (the science of using stem cells to create an organ) and working on a breast cancer research project at the American University of Beirut (AUB), when something struck him. “In the literature, we understand exactly how important the physiology of those tissues is and how important the micro environment is, but when I started working in the lab, it was totally different,” said Wadah. The results looked nothing like what happened inside an actual human body.
That gap between theory and practice led him to create six years later DLOC Biosystems, a startup that’s attempting to solve one of the pharmaceutical industry’s most stubborn problems: An estimated 90% or more of drugs that pass preclinical testing fail in clinical trials.
The $2.6 Billion Problem
The current drug development process is onerous. It costs on average of $2.6 billion and takes 10 to 15 years to bring a drug to market. Out of 10,000 compounds, only 8 to 10 make it to clinical trials. And most of those fail.
Scientists have traditionally conducted preclinical studies on cells grown in cultures or on animals. Neither approach entirely captures the physiology of humans or the complexity of living tissue.
Armed with a degree in mechanical engineering from AUB, Wadah set out to build a so-called lab-on-a-chip or organ-on-a-chip, a miniature drug screening platform where different cell types communicate the way they do in the body. His early prototype gained international attention after winning Qatar Foundation’s Stars of Science competition in 2020, securing funding to accelerate development.
Engineering Biology at Micrometer Scale
At DLOC’s core is a chip the size of a penny, embedded with ultra-thin scaffolds just 7 micrometers thick—thinner than a human hair. These scaffolds guide human cells to organize into organ structures: a liver with its bile ducts, a kidney’s filtering tubules, and even a blood-brain barrier.
An “operating system” can accommodate multiple miniature chips, connecting organs, pumping media and drugs, signaling to each chip independently, and mimicking how the body actually works. The chips preserve the micro environment which dictates how different cells behave. “I need to make sure that the components of the media going to the liver are different from the ones that go to the kidney, while they’re connected to each other and communicating with each other,” said Wadah.
He searched for manufacturers who could handle the precision required. When no one could, he built the machines himself. His first three employees included an artist, someone with exceptional fine motor skills, to assemble components under a microscope. “I needed to hire either a dentist, someone who can fix watches, or an artist,” he said.
From Beirut to London and Back
DLOC operates a testing facility at Discovery Park, one-hour from London, but the manufacturing of chips is in a custom-built clean room near Aley, Lebanon, where a team of engineers build the company’s proprietary machines.
It may sound like an unconventional setup, but it’s worked. DLOC has already filed multiple patents across key jurisdictions. The team has grown to 26 people, and is preparing pilots with pharmaceutical companies. The company has raised roughly $2.6 million to date, and is raising for a Series A.
The Future of Medicine
Wadah is also developing AI-driven software that could enable precision medicine: taking a biopsy from an individual patient, testing their tissue on a chip, and using machine learning to help tailor a treatment. “The future of medicine is precision and personalized medicine,” says Wadah. No more one-size-fits-all.