[TEDxBoston: ‘Body parts on a chip’ by Geraldine Hamilton]
The
pharmaceutical industry is always faced with challenges in discovering and
developing new drugs. What could be the reasons for the industry to experience
supply shock of therapies? The development of new drugs demand vast amount of financial
investment and time. More importantly, there is a subtle chance of success.
There
are two principal techniques available to test the efficacy and the safety:
cells in dishes and animal testing. As mentioned beforehand, there are
constraints in both of them. In case of cells in dishes, the human cells are placed
in dishes and examined in an environment that has no such resemblance of the actual
body. The animal testing provides various practical information on the effect
on complex organism, however, animal models founder to anticipate the actual
effect on human body. As a result, these methods are inadequate for the development
of successful drugs as they fundamentally fail to create the dynamic environment
of the body.
Wyss
Institute, medical research institute, came up with a great solution. The
revolutionary invention of “organ-on-a-chip”. An organ-on-a-chip is a multi-channel
3-D microfluidic cell culture chip. This chip is the smallest functioning unit with
the function and the mechanical strain that cells experience in our body.
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| Lung-on-a-chip ⓒ Wyss Institute |
Observing
the lung-on-a-chip, there are three fluidic channels: lung cells on top, porous
flexible membrane in the center where cells are cultured, and capillary cells from
the blood vessels underneath. The vacuum channels on the sides apply mechanical
forces to the chip, so that the cells experience the exact motions as they
would in the actual lungs. The bacterial cells are added to the layer of the
lung cells, and human white blood cells are released in the layer of the capillary
cells. The white blood cells move through the pores of the membrane in the
center and reach the other side where they engulf the bacteria (phagocytosis).
In fact, the chip has successfully demonstrated the immune response in our
body. In other words, chips will create models of diseases and carry out trials
on the dynamic responses to potential new treatments. There is a pipeline of
chips for different organs such as liver, gut, lungs, heart, and bone marrow.
Thus, we can interconnect multiple different chips together to construct a
virtual human-on-a-chip.
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| 1) The white blood cell in the layer of capillary cells 2) The white blood cell going through the pore of the membrane 3) Phagocytosis of the bacterial cell by the white blood cell ⓒ Wyss Insitute |
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| ⓒ Wyss Institute |
Reference
KSJ
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