I-Corps: 3D Organ on a Chip

University Of California-San Diego, La Jolla CA

Investigators

Abstract

This I-Corps team has developed a method to create small tissue mimics of human organs within a microfluidics chip. Using this technology, we aim to create multiple chips, each representing a different organ system, to create an artificial "human-on-a-chip" platform to assess the organ specific and systemic effect of drug candidates without having to test these compounds in the human body. Currently, pharmaceutical companies spend billions of dollars and a few decades in drug development process, which effectively reduces thousands of candidates to one successful compound that can be put into the market. Initially, these candidates are tested on cells that are plated on plastic dishes, which do not resemble the conditions that would be faced by cells in the body. As a direct result, too many candidates advance from this stage into the costly and more time consuming preclinical animal studies, driving up the cost of drug development significantly. This team believes that the proposed organ-on-a-chip system, which not only recreates the structural features of native tissue, but also mimics the perfusion of blood in the body, will screen out drug candidates before progressing towards animal models. In addition, these chips will provide a more relevant perspective to the inner workings of biological systems on an organ level, allowing us to "de-risk" promising candidates by eliminating the poor performers. Using the proposed technology for generating organ-on-a-chips, the team has successfully created proof-of-concept prototypes of the heart-and tumor-on-a-chip platforms. Initially, the heart-on-a-chip platform has been chosen to showcase the proposed technology and address the need for assessing cardiac toxicity, which is a major concern for pharmaceutical companies. In the tumor-on-a-chip platform, the team has integrated different cell types found in the tumor microenvironment to mimic the progression of cancer. By providing a physiological relevant mixture of cells, the proposed system will provide the ability for pharmaceutical companies to assess the specificity of targeted cancer therapeutics, which have now become the norm in the treatment of oncology. For both platforms, one common goal is to provide further evidence of the relevance of our devices for drug testing purposes. To this end, the team will form partnerships with pharmaceutical companies to tap into their drug candidate libraries which have been tested prior to establish their efficacy and toxicity. The team will demonstrate the proposed platform's ability to recapitulate these drug specific results, which will allow them to build credibility amongst potential customers.