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Healthcare technology
Organ-on-a-chip, the Impressive Result of Technology and Medicine Working
Together
Animal Testing: Inhumane and Seemingly Inefficient
Until not so long ago, testing a new drug on animals before forwarding it to human subjects was obligatory.
In the USA, the Food and Drug Administration(FDA) allowed the use of alternatives to animal testing in the process of developing new medicine with the FDA Modernization Act passed in 2022.
In the UK, the government confirmed that testing a new drug on two species of animals was just a suggestion almost two years later.
The European Commission has also enforced its support for the replacement of animal testing with NAMs(New approach methodologies, such as organs-on-a-cell, organoids or donated human tissues. Could also be used to refer to non-animal methods).
With these reforms in mind, animal testing is still a prevalent practice in the filed of drug development, as alternatives are scarce and experimental, and humans cannot interact with an entirely theoretical medicine. Before the developing of alternatives, tough, animal testing was the only real option, and, as recent research suggests, it wasn’t and isn’t even the viable option professionals thought it is.
A study for developing new medicine for acute stroke patients failed to achieve the positive outcomes animal subjects presented in the human test phase.
This isn’t a singular case: many other drugs in development fail when it comes to human subjects.
The reason for the lack of good results is simple: while we share many similarities with animals(mice, the most popular test subject, shares 98% of its genes with us), differences exist, and those differences can be gamechangers. For many drug developers, the uncertainty of results can prevent advancement. Thankfully, the rapidly evolving field of medicine has created some promising alternatives, one of them being the organ-on-a-chip.
What is an organ-on-a-chip?
As the name suggests, this invention represents miniature structures mimicking human organ tissues placed in the interior of versatile microchips. It involves biomaterial technology, cell biology and engineering combined together in a miniaturized platform. Several models using different organs such as lungs-on-a-chip, liver-on-a-chip, kidney-on-a-chip, heart-on-a-chip, intestine-on-a-chip and skin-on-a-chip have been successfully developed. By creating a fluid transport system between different models of organs-on-a-chips, scientists have managed to create entire ”humans-on-a-chip”.
History of the organ-on-a-chip In the early 2000s, researchers Dan Huh and Shuichi Takayama were interested in seeing whether they could model excess fluid accumulation, which occurs in diseased lungs, in an artificial model. Their experimentation gave birth to the first organ-on-a-chip prototypes, designed to replicate the lungs airway systems.
After attending one of Takayama’s presentations on the matter, Donald Ingber, founding director of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, gained an interest for the topic and invited Huh to his lab.
In 2010, they successfully created the first lung-chip capable of emulating breathing motions. Following this success, Ingber and his team used funding to develop more than 15 organ-on-a-chip models. Progress hasn’t stopped since, with new models surpassing the quality of their predecessors and availability rising.