‘Organ on a chip’: a tech which mimics disease systems in laboratory conditions

Subject: Science and technology

Section: Biotechnology

Concept:

The passage of the Food and Drug Administration Modernization Act 2.0 by the US government in December 2022 is expected to provide momentum to the R&D of “organ chips”.

Organ chips or Organ on a chip model

Organ chips are small devices with human cells that are used to mimic the environment in human organs such as blood flow and breathing movements, that can act as synthetic environments to test new drugs.
Such chips are translucent which helps provide a window for researchers to look into the inner workings of the organ being studied.
Donald Ingber, a professor of bioengineering and director of the Wyss Institute at Harvard University along with his colleagues developed the first human organ-on-a-chip model in 2010.
This first organ-on-a-chip model was a “lung on a chip” that resembled the biochemical aspects of the lung and its breathing mechanism.
Later in 2014, members of the Wyss Institute started a startup named “Emulate Inc.” to commercialise the organ-on-a-chip technology.
This group of researchers at Emulate Inc have created various such different chips which include that of the epithelial barrier, bone marrow, kidney, gut, vagina and liver.

Significance

The most significant advantage of using Organ on a chip technology is that it can help predict how specific organs respond to the exposure of a potential chemical hazard found in foods, cosmetics and/or dietary supplements with better precision than other methods currently in use such as cell-culture or animal-based tests.
Further, the Organ on a chip model is seen to be an alternative for clinical trials of drugs on animals which are criticised widely as an unethical and scientifically bogus practice.
Organ chips can thus help prevent the death of thousands of laboratory animals.
The technology can be used to identify, develop, and test novel drugs to treat a host of different diseases in a reliable manner and predict treatment outcomes better than conventional systems.
Example: the liver chips developed by Emulate Inc could predict the ability of drugs to cause liver injury with 87% sensitivity and 100% specificity.
Further, the liver chips were used to assess the toxic effects of 27 drugs known to be either safe or unsafe for human livers.
The organ chips developed from isolating cells from a patient to develop biomimetic tissues that mimic a specific disease can be used to extend personalised therapies for individual patients.

Organ chips in India

A few of the research groups in India have also involved themselves in developing new organ-on-chip models.
Researchers and experts at the Institute of Chemical Technology, Mumbai along with a team of chemical engineers at IIT Bombay have developed a skin-on-chip model.
This model is being tested for studying skin irritation and toxicity.
This group of experts has also developed a retina-on-chip model.
Researchers in India are also developing a placenta-on-chip model.
Apart from organs, researchers are also trying to mimic different diseases using organ chips.
A team of experts at the Savitribai Phule Pune University (SPPU), have developed an infection-on-a-chip model to recreate a human skin wound infection state.
The objective is to mimic an infection that doesn’t heal despite repeated antibiotic treatment.