A technological and scientific breakthrough, which has been aptly named organs-on-chips, could revolutionise drug testing and spell an end to the animal testing regime thereby benefiting not only us, but also animals.
Organs-on-Chips technology is based on pioneering work conducted by Donald Ingber, M.D., Ph.D. and his team at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University. Emulate Inc. was launched from the Wyss Institute’s technology translation program in July 2014, providing Emulate with a worldwide license to a robust and broad intellectual property portfolio from Harvard University for the Organs-on-Chips technology.
The Organs-on-Chips technology places living human cells in microengineered environments and provides for an integrated system that provides a window into the inner-workings of the human body. The technology is said to set a new standard for predicting human response, with greater precision and detail than today’s cell culture or animal-based testing.
The Organs-on-Chips contain tiny hollow channels lined by living human cells and tissues cultured under continuous fluid flow and mechanical forces, such as cyclic breathing and peristalsis, which recreate the microenvironment experienced by cells within the human body.
Each Organ-on-Chip can contain tens of thousands of cells and is approximately the size of a USB memory stick.
Organs-on-Chips are miniaturized living systems that represent the smallest functional unit of an organ that effectively recapitulate organ-level physiology and disease responses. Multiple Organs-on-Chips, such as lung, liver, intestine, kidney, skin, eye, and blood-brain-barrier, can be linked together by flowing human blood or nutrient-containing liquid to create a “Human-Body-on-Chips” that closely replicates whole body-level responses.
Organs-on-Chips platform have already been deployed across certain Janssen Biotech Inc.’s programs to better predict the potential human response of drug candidates and improve the drug development process.
The collaboration, which was facilitated by the Johnson & Johnson Innovation Center in Boston, utilizes Emulate’s Organs-on-Chips to advance the clinical goals for three Janssen R&D programs at the stages of drug candidate design and selection. Emulate’s technology will also support Janssen’s effort to enhance drug discovery and development with its 3Rs program: reduction, refinement and replacement of animal testing.
The public disclosure of this collaboration coincides with the achievement by Emulate and Janssen scientists of the first functional demonstration of Emulate’s Thrombosis-on-Chip platform. Using the new Thrombosis-on-Chip that models human response in an engineered living microenvironment, the Emulate and Janssen research teams are evaluating the potential for drug candidates to cause thrombosis, a potential side effect of certain drug classes such as immuno-therapeutics and oncology drugs.
The Thrombosis-on-Chip is an example of the application of the range of different Organs-on-Chips within Emulate’s platform for providing more predictive data on potential human response to drugs that will enable the design and selection of drug candidates that have a higher potential of success in human clinical trials.
