1:55 PM - 2:25 PM
▲ [5p-A203-3] Body on a Chip: Towards developing an in-vitro human model and its application
Keywords:Organ on a Chip, Body on a Chip, Microfluidics
Drug discovery is now facing serious issues such as high costs and time-consuming procedures, as well as serious side effects during clinical trials or after introduction into the market. To tackle these issues, we focus on the pre-clinical tests with the use of animal models. Pre-clinical trials with the use of animal models are carried out to evaluate drug efficacy and safety. However, animal models are limited by factors such as suitability as a human model, robustness, cost, and ethnic issues. While an Organ-on-a-Chip using human cells is advantageous as a human model, it is still difficult to reproduce drugs’ side effects using one type of tissue. Moreover, the current platforms have either a one-way flow stream or a few branches in a chip, and they cannot mimic a blood circulation system yet. Here, we developed Body-on-a-Chip (BoC) platform with human heart and cancer cells to recapitulate the side effects of an anti-cancer drug, doxorubicin (DXR). Our BoC platform allows individual culture of cells from different tissues on a single device and creation of an artificial blood circulation loop by integrating pneumatic micro pumps and valves. Thus, the BoC platform offers reproducing DXR side effects on heart cells, which cannot be obtained using conventional cell culturewares. We envision that this platform will be able to recapitulate physiological and pathological conditions for precise investigation of drug efficacy and toxicity, which would be a significant step toward realizing personalized medicine.