Angela Stoyanovitch, host of the Legal Drugs Podcast, sits down with Dr. Tom Villani, PhD, Founder and Chief Science Officer at Visikol Inc. during the 58th annual meeting of the Society of Toxicology that took place in Baltimore, MD in March 2019. Angela and Tom record this bit in the booth during the ToxExpo exhibit hall to introduce their product, services and founding story.  

When Tom was a graduate student studying medicinal chemistry at Rutgers University, his advisor frequented remote villages in Africa around thirties weeks a year collaborating with medicine men and women.  He returned with many varieties of plant material which they then had to classify by the plant’s genius and species. He describes their methods of determination as a sort of forensic

investigation called botanical microscopy. When they attended a course to learn how to use this method, they discovered a “date rape” type-drug would be used in the methodology. This drug is called Chloral hydrate which has limited use as a sedative and hypnotic pharmaceutical drug but is a useful laboratory chemical reagent and precursor. While it has no legitimate medical use and is no longer available on the legal drug market.  Tom was shocked to learn this was the standard material used for botanical microscopy.  From there, he set out with his advisor to discover a product that was not an illegal narcotic.  After a few publications, he decided to spinoff a company to launch the product to be used to examine a variety of tissues and cells.  He made the first batch in his mom’s basement! After an entry on Wikipedia and a simple website, he onboarded a CEO, raised investment money and took his company, Visikol, Inc. to the next level. Eventually, they licensed the product to Thermo Fisher Scientific who calls the product, CytoVistatm Tissue Clearing Reagent. Today, the company focus on the services they offer to customers. 

During the interview, Angela is handed a one-day-old mouse that was stained and cleared with their product. (Check out the photos on our social media accounts!) Tom explains there are many uses for this clearing agent including the examination of brain tissue, for example, and other neuroscience projects.  He points out a company across the exhibit hall that uses the product for their nerve on a chip model.  He describes the benefit of a tissue clearing technique as one that provides a full picture as opposed to a cross-section of the problem at hand.  Tom offers an analogy of determining an issue with your car but only seeing a cross-section picture.  It would be more difficult to diagnose this issue with the car without seeing the whole view.  He equates this to the value of tissue clearing techniques as being able to examine the area of disease within a tissue as opposed to a cross-section view. Rather than relying on statistical techniques to extrapolate what’s going on in tissues, Visikol’s product and service offers a way for researchers to count every cell and figure out exactly what’s going on at each point in a given tissue.  

Learn more at www.visikol.com. 

This episode edited and produced by Margaret Beveridge.