Courtesy Wyss Institute

Wyss Institute researchers and a multidisciplinary team of collaborators seek to build and link 10 human organs-on-chips to mimic whole body physiology. The system will incorporate the Institutes Human Gut-on-a-Chip (seen here).

Harvards Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University announced recently it will receive $37 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to develop technology that studies the human physiology.

The five-year project will be led by Wyss Founding Director, Donald Ingber, M.D., Ph.D. and Wyss faculty member, Kevin Kit Parker, Ph.D. in conjunction with Wyss researchers and a multidisciplinary team of collaborators, a statement reads.

The project will develop an automated instrument that integrates 10, organs-on-chips to study complex human physiology outside the body.

Serving as an alternative to traditional animal testing models that often fail to predict human responses, the automated instrument will be used to rapidly assess responses to new drug candidates, providing critical information on their safety and efficacy, according to the release.

Equal in size to a computer memory stick, each individual chip is composed of a clear flexible polymer that contains hollow microfluidic channels lined by living human cells.

Because of the translucency of the microdevices, researchers have a window into the inner-workings of human organs without having to invade a living body.

The goal is to shorten the time and cost it takes to develop drugs, and more importantly, to increase the likelihood of success when the drug finally is tested in humans currently it is less than 15 percent success, even after many years and hundreds of millions to billions investment, Ingber wrote in an email to Mass High Tech.

In a statement, Jesse Goodman, Food and Drug Administration chief scientist and deputy commissioner for science and public health, said the automated human-on-chip instrument being developed has the potential to be a better model for determining human adverse responses. FDA looks forward to working with the Wyss Institute in its development of this model that may ultimately be used in therapeutic development.

Originally posted here:
Harvard gets $37M to develop 'human-on-a-chip' tech