Organ-on-a-chip are currently mainly used by researchers to develop and test new ones medicines, studying scar tissue or cancerous metastases in the bloodstream. The aim is also to better understand how cells behave in their microenvironment or how diseases develop and spread throughout the body.
Organ-on-a-chip technologie
The so-called organ-on-a-chip is a small computer chip with human cells on a plastic plate with integrated micro channels and chambers. Within it, virtually invisible complex tissues of human cells grow in an environment that mimics the human body.
The living cells are supplied with nutrients by a pump that supplies and removes a minimal amount of liquid to the cells. Sensors measure how cells respond. Any changes are made with. Consider changing the pressure, mechanical force, oxygen level or flow rate.
Universal standard
The lack of a universal standard for the organ-on-a-chip means that pharmaceutical companies are not yet widely used. The ‘organ chips’ that are still being developed are intended for research purposes. As a result, there are too many different chips, each with a different design, size and material. They are also difficult to fit into the pipeline of the pharmaceutical industry and scaling up to larger numbers is very difficult.
The Dutch hDMT consortium wants to get there now change in make. Ten research groups from eight universities have united within the consortium. They work together with 21 companies, three knowledge institutions and two foundations. Under the leadership of Professor of Microsystems Jaap den Toonder of Eindhoven University of Technology, the consortium and the collaborating parties will develop a standardized and modular platform for organs-on-chips: the ‘SMART Organ-on-Chip’.
This universal standard should also benefit the pharmaceutical industry in particular. The development of a new medicine usually takes at least 10 years and billions of euros. This is the result of the different phases that a new medicine has to go through. In practice, moreover, about 80 percent of new medicines are still dropped in the final phase. This lengthy development and testing procedure must be considerably shortened with the help of organ-on-a-chip technology.
“If you can test the drugs directly on a realistic human organ-on-a-chip model, where the complexity of the body is immediately taken into account, then you can eliminate harmful or ineffective drugs much earlier in the process, so that a lot of costs are incurred. saved ”, says Den Toonder.
Organ-on-a-chip as standard
The researchers are building a so-called docking plate for the development of a universal standard. It has a standard size that contains the fluid channels and electronics. Then the chips can be clicked on as modules.
In this way, standard tissue chips, with the cells in the correct micro-environment, can be made, as well as technical chips with innovative liquid pumps and physical and chemical sensors. “That makes the system flexible, you can click the chips in any combination you want, depending on the type of organ you want to research and the question you want to answer,” says Den Toonder.
The entire system is in line with pharmaceutical processes and biomedical R&D. For example, to be able to work with pipetting robots and complex microscopic techniques. And with that, the organ-on-a-chip becomes an accessible ‘open technology’ with which other companies can develop their own applications and add them to the existing platform.
Focus on scar tissue
In the Perspectief program for which the NWO grant has been made available, the researchers focus specifically on the development of scar tissue: fibrosis. The so-called fibrosis sometimes progresses in organs to proliferating connective tissue growths. The environment of the organ plays a major role in this. Therefore, when studying this process, it is crucial to include that environment in the organ-on-a-chip models
“The NWO Perspectief grant gives us the opportunity to bring together the broad multidisciplinary group of scientists you need for such a development with industrial partners, from manufacturing industry to end users,” says Den Toonder.
Opening event 2021
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