Biofore Magazine 2020

By Craig Houston Photography Katariina Salmi

THROUGH THE LENS

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The future of medicine is about to get personal Piia Mikkonen is a Product Development Scientist at UPM Biomedicals. She started her career in academia at the University of Turku and admits: “I never dreamt I would end up working for a forest company! I worked in a project with GrowDex and couldn’t quite believe at first that you could use birch trees in cell culture. I was impressedwith how innovative the product was and now I’mworking for UPM.” GrowDex is a ready-to-use hydrogel that supports cell growth with consistent results. Made us- ing nanocellulose found in birch trees, the product is also sustainable, sterile and environmentally friendly. It can be used across a range of biomedical research and is completely animal-free. In fact, GrowDex is being used to reduce theneed for animal testing inbiomedical applications. Furthermore, it is being applied to the expanding and innovative concept of personalisedmedicine. Personalised medicine refers to the process of approaching a patient’s treatment from a personal perspective. Specifically, it uses an individual’s molecular and genetic profile to help determine the best medical treatment procedure. For example, if a patient has been diagnosed with cancer, rather than receiving the prescribed broad spectrum treatment for that cancer, a sample of their cancer can be extracted from the patient and used to screen a range of other compounds that may bemore effec- tive or result in fewer side effects. This allows for an individual, personalised treatment plan. UPM’s GrowDex hydrogel helpswith this process by creating an environment similar to the human body for the cells. Examining samples in 3D rather than conventional 2D allows researchers to recre- ate the way they grow in the body rather than on a flat, two-dimensional surface. “GrowDex is inert, meaning there is nothing extra in it that would disturb the analysis of the cells – it is essentially na- nocellulose and water. The hydrogel surrounds the cell and replicates the three-dimensional cellular environment found in the human body,”Mikkonen says. This is only the beginning for this treatment approach, which is being spearheaded by Finnish re- search. “At themoment, personalisedmedicine studies usingGrowDex are focused on a specific range of diseases, but there is no reason why they cannot be advanced to include other aspects of medicine in the medium-term. I firmly believe that this is the future of medical treatment; however, the only question now is over who will pay for its universal rollout,” says Mikkonen.