“Body on a Chip”, developed by MIT engineers, tests a drug's effect on different organs simultaneously before human consumption, avoiding animal testing all together

Orange County, CA - March 15th, 2018 -  

Engineers at MIT have developed a new way to test drugs and evaluate their effectiveness and potential side effects before the drugs are tested on humans. Animal testing can only show so much- drugs are designed to interact with the human immune system. Preclinical testing on animals can reveal information on the safety and effectiveness before human testing, but those tests may not show potential side effects. Furthermore, drugs that work on animals have often failed in human trials.

“Animals do not represent people in all the facets that you need to develop drugs and understand disease,” says Linda Griffith, the School of Engineering Professor of Teaching Innovation, a professor of biological engineering and mechanical engineering, and one of the senior authors of the study, published in the journal Scientific Reports. “That is becoming more and more apparent as we look across all kinds of drugs.” Genetic background, environmental influences, lifestyle, and other drugs are added reasons complications arise in animal versus human testing.

To solve this issue, the engineers created a microfluidic platform that connects engineered tissues from up to 10 organs. This platform can accurately replicate human organ interactions for weeks at a time, allowing the research team time to measure the effects of drugs on different parts of the body. “Some of these effects are really hard to predict from animal models because the situations that lead to them are idiosyncratic,” says Griffith. “With our chip, you can distribute a drug and then look for the effects on other tissues, and measure the exposure and how it is metabolized.”

“Body on a Chip”, developed by MIT engineers, tests a drug's effect on different organs simultaneously before human consumption, avoiding animal testing all together.

Led by the Defense Advanced Projects Agency (DARPA), Griffith and her team refer to their model as a “physiome on a chip.” Before the project launch, the team had not successfully connected more than a few different tissue types on the platform. Additionally, most researchers working on the chip were working with closed microfluidic systems, which allow fluid to flow in and out but do not offer an easy way to manipulate what is happening inside the chip. The team decided to create an open system, which fundamentally removed the lid and made it easier to manipulate the system and remove samples for analysis. This solution also incorporated several on-board pumps that control the flow of liquid between the “organs,” replicating the circulation of immune cells, blood, and proteins throughout the human body. The pumps also allowed larger engineered tissues, such as tumors within an organ, to be evaluated.

Using this platform system, the team was able to show that they could deliver a drug to the gastrointestinal tissue, mimic the oral ingestion of the drug, and observe as the drug was transported to other tissues and metabolized. Griffith and her team believe that the most immediate application for this system involves modeling two to four organs. They are also developing a model system for Parkinson’s disease that includes brain, liver, and gastrointestinal tissue. Other applications they plan to test include modeling tumors that metastasize to other parts of the body.

“An advantage of our platform is that we can scale it up or down and accommodate a lot of different configurations,” Griffith says. “I think the field is going to go through a transition where we start to get more information out of a three-organ or four-organ system, and it will start to become cost-competitive because the information you’re getting is so much more valuable.”

The research was funded by the U.S. Army Research Office and DARPA. David Trumper, MIT professor of mechanical engineering, and Murat Cirit, a research scientist in the Department of Biological Engineering, are also senior authors of the study. The study’s lead authors are former MIT postdocs Collin Edington and Wen Li Kelly Chen.

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“Body on a Chip”, developed by MIT engineers, tests a drug’s effect on different organs simultaneously before human consumption, avoiding animal testing all together.  Orange County, CA – March 15th, 2018 –   Engineers at MIT have developed a new way to test drugs and evaluate their effectiveness and potential side effects before the drugs are tested […]