ORGAN CHIP

1. Context

2. Introducing a new drug

• Bringing a new drug into the market is an expensive process ridden with failure.
  First, researchers identify chemical compounds that can be used to treat a condition using the modeling and other techniques.
• Then they shortlist those that perform well and test them on cells grown on plastic dishes in the lab or on animals that can mimic the disease in certain conditions.
• At this stage called the preclinical trial, scientists determine whether these drugs are toxic and if they can efficaciously treat the condition.
• Animals used here include mice, rats, hamsters, and guinea pigs, depending on the drug being tested.
• Researchers also use pigs when testing implant devices like stents. If the trial results are favorable, researchers can begin human clinical trials.
• These challenges have led scientists to look for alternative models that mimic human diseases. One such is the organ­on­a­chip model, which has garnered a lot of attention in the last decade.

3. About Organ Chips

• Donald Ingber, a professor of bioengineering and director of the Wyss Institute at Harvard University, and his colleagues developed the first human organonachip model in 2010.
• It was a lung on a chip that mimicked biochemical aspects of the lung and its breathing motions.
• In 2014, Wyss Institute members launched a startup called Emulate Inc to commercialize their technology.
• The group has since created several different chips, including the bone marrow, epithelial barrier, lung, gut, kidney, and vagina.

4. Organ chips in India

• A few research groups in India have also been developing organ­on­chip models.
  Prajakta Dandekar­Jain is an assistant professor of pharmaceutical sciences and technology at the Institute of Chemical Technology, Mumbai.
• Her group has developed a skin­on­chip model together with the team of Abhijit Majumdar, an associate professor of chemical engineering at IIT Bombay.
• The model is currently being tested for studying skin irritation and toxicity.  The two groups are also developing a retina­on­chip model together.
• Apart from organs, researchers are also trying to mimic different disease states using chips.
• Kaushik Chatterjee, an associate professor of materials engineering, and Deepak K. Saini, a professor of developmental biology and genetics at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, are doing this for the lung.

5. Ready to use

• Some of these organs­on­chips that Indian scientists have developed are ready for use as drug test­beds in lab settings, but they could be a decade away from featuring in preclinical trials, with a push, according to experts.
• Researchers and biomedical companies in the west have started to build larger humanonchip models assemblies of different organ chips containing nutrients for the cells flowing across them, mimicking the flow of blood and nutrients across different organs in the body.
• The idea is to predict the efficacy of a drug against a particular disease in the presence of messy organ interactions instead of cleanly isolated systems.