Human body-on-chip platform could speed up drug testing
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Human body-on-chip platform could speed up drug testing
1–10 of 47 posts
Re: Human body-on-chip platform could speed up drug testing
#2So they're basically trying to simulate humans? What a world we live in
Re: Human body-on-chip platform could speed up drug testing
#3If you can really, truly get liver-on-a-chip to work, it's going to positively change drug testing forever and will be the first huge win for tissue engineering.
You can throw away animal models for tox screens forever, and that's great news. It will save vast amount of time and money. By using a much better proxy model for humans (slices aren't organs, they have different rheological characteristics and morphology, but they're a damn sight better than mice), you'll wash out candidates earlier and faster, and hopefully enrich the pipeline.
Slowly but surely, and it's good to see steps in this direction.
Re: Human body-on-chip platform could speed up drug testing
#4I've heard nearly any implant you put inside body has negative impact and this is also true for titanium implants which is seemingly inert and harmless metal.
How many people their body with some industrial chip, I'll never use anything like this unless my life depends on it.
Re: Human body-on-chip platform could speed up drug testing
#5I've heard nearly any implant you put inside body has negative impact and this is also true for titanium implants which is seemingly inert and harmless metal. How many people their body with some industrial chip, I'll never use anything like this unless my life depends on it.
This isn't a chip for implanting inside the body; this is a microfluidic chip that replicates some body systems in the laboratory.
Re: Human body-on-chip platform could speed up drug testing
#6Does anyone have a layman-accessible explanation for how exactly this works? My last biology class was freshman year of college, but I find the "body-on-chip" startups incredibly interesting. I take it this is different than "growing" organs via stem cells?
Re: Human body-on-chip platform could speed up drug testing
#7Does anyone have a layman-accessible explanation for how exactly this works? My last biology class was freshman year of college, but I find the "body-on-chip" startups incredibly interesting. I take it this is different than "growing" organs via stem cells?
Basically, when you are growing organs or organoids (or 3d printing organs) with stem cells (which are used for organ on a chip too), you're actually trying to recreate the physical organ itself in it's original structure/function. You can imagine in the extreme the end result of trying to do this with a lung would be actually having a working lung that you could transplant into a person.
Organ on a chip is less about making a lung, amd more about making a very controllable device that that has all the relevant behaviors and characteristics of a lung, so you can experiment with it. The end result of this might be a bunch of chips all connected to eachother with all sorts of tubes, and different cells grown in each tube with exact stimuli of all sorts being applied by an automated system. The goal wouldn't be to make a long you could put into a person. Rather, the goal would be to make something that, when you put a drug in through one of the tubes, would tell you exactly what would happen to the drug and how the lung of a real person would react if you were to give them the drug.
The lines can get blurred, organoids on a chip, 3d printed organs used for research purposes, etc. But in general, (and you'll see this in how the different companies market themselves) growing organs is trying to get functional organs that could eliminate the need for a donor for an organ transplant, and organ on a chip is trying to get perfect research tools to eliminate the need for mice in research.
Re: Human body-on-chip platform could speed up drug testing
#8I've heard nearly any implant you put inside body has negative impact and this is also true for titanium implants which is seemingly inert and harmless metal. How many people their body with some industrial chip, I'll never use anything like this unless my life depends on it.
These are being made as research tools, not as implants
Re: Human body-on-chip platform could speed up drug testing
#9I've heard nearly any implant you put inside body has negative impact and this is also true for titanium implants which is seemingly inert and harmless metal. How many people their body with some industrial chip, I'll never use anything like this unless my life depends on it.
This isn't a chip for implanting inside the body; this is a microfluidic chip that replicates some body systems in the laboratory.
OK why the need for a physical chip, why not replicate in software?
Re: Human body-on-chip platform could speed up drug testing
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
This isn't a chip for implanting inside the body; this is a microfluidic chip that replicates some body systems in the laboratory.
OK why the need for a physical chip, why not replicate in software?
Because we can't effectively model the behavior of human tissue in software.