A ‘chip’ off the old block?

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Well, here’s another chapter in the sci v. scifi book.  I wrote about Organovo and its artificial liver – not to replace a human’s organ, but to test various therapies and drugs.  Now, here’s another researcher’s take on that issue.

Dr. Donald Ingber is the director of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering (Harvard University), where this research is ongoing.  Ingber recognizes that employing animal models to test drugs is not the best concept- and it also does not always afford accurate predictions how humans will react to the tested therapies.

So, he wants us to use actual human cells. But, instead of growing a complete artificial organ, he proposes we use cells organized on a computer chip, which exhibit ‘organ-like’ function and are easier to produce.  They term these devices ‘biomimetric microsystems’.  Each of these devices is the size of a USB memory chip.

Their first success was that of a synthetic lung- that could breath.  About the size of our thumb, this transparent, flexible unit, complete with channels (affording air and nutrient flow), can be subjected to negative pressure on the side channels. In so doing, the central channels will expand and contract, just like our lungs.  (this also enabled them to determine that mechanical forces do affect cell behavior.)

Organs on a chip (biomimetric microsystems)
From the Wyss Institute website

Wyss has also developed human intestines using the same platform.  Here, the central channel can be subjected to waves to mimic peristalsis (the movement that propels food during digestion). The cells even form villi (the rivulets that are indented into the intestinal channel, which afford nutrient absorption).

This is a critical development to testing protocols, since tissue-cultured cells don’t form these organelles.  (One can even introduce bacterial cells into the “organ” to more closely mimic the environment of the human intestines.  Such introduction would “flood” tissue cultures, leaving it a useless mess of cells.) This “gut chip” is comprised of two channels separated by a membrane; the human cells grow on the porous membrane.

Heart on a chip
Heart on a chip

Ingber hopes his group could link various chips together to mimic the action of organ systems (right now, they think it will take 10 organ chips) or the human body.  They also can link chips together to determine how a therapy might affect more than a single organ- which is a known issue, one that cannot be discerned using tissue culture, since that only is a single organ mimic.

Ten chips or so is a big development.  So, right now they are focusing  on how inhaled drugs affect the heart.  This means the lung chip must communicate with the heart chip.

One small step in the demise of animal testing.

 

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