Human body-on-chip platform may speed up drug development
Drug development is an arduous and costly process, and failure rates in clinical trials that test new drugs for their safety and efficacy in humans remain high. According to current estimates, only 13.8 percent of all tested drugs demonstrate ultimate clinical success and obtain approval by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). There are also increasing issues regarding animal studies, and a search for replacements. To help address this bottleneck in drug development, Donald Ingber and his team at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, developed the first human “organ-on-a-chip” (organ chip) model of the lung that recapitulates human organ level physiology and pathophysiology with high fidelity, which was reported in Science in 2010. Organ chips are microfluidic culture devices composed of a clear flexible polymer the size of a computer memory stick, which contains two parallel hollow channels that are separated by a porous membrane. Organ-specific cells are cultured...