A recent advance in bioengineering to facilitate drug development is the “organ-on-a-chip” innovation described last summer in Science. The chip is a medical device with cells of a tissue such as those of kidney grown on it. It was first created by Harvard bioengineerers; another version was later built by Japanese scientists. This innovation could potentially solve some of the problems associated with current drug testing protocols in the pharmaceutical industry. It will likely save time and money in drug development.
Traditionally, pre-clinical studies of drug development involve extensive toxicity experiments on animals and cultured cells. These standard means of evaluating the safety of drugs have been in place for years. Even though animal testing gives a lot of information about the safety and dosing profile of a drug, it is after all not done on human beings. Chances are that some unpredicted side effects could occur when the drug enters clinical trials. The inconsistences between animal and human being cost money and time to pharmaceutical companies. Immortalized cell lines in culture bear even less resemblance to human physiological environments, their usefulness are thus often questioned.
“Organ-on-a-chip” has circumvented many problems associated with animal testing and cultured cells. The most important characteristic of the human cells are retained when they are grown on the chip. The assembly works like a miniature organ and responses to drugs and other chemical factors in the same way as they do in the innate physiological environment. This response to a drug is therefore a more accurate indictor of what one will see in clincial trials. Another benefit of the chip is to allow scientists to obtain personalized responses by subsets of patient population to a drug. This will aide in developing differential treaments immensely.
Source
“Organs-on-a-Chip for Faster Drug Development” by Melinda Wenner Moyer, Scientific American, February 25, 2011
