Project description
‘Hairy’ organs-on-chips: boosting the success of clinical trials
The drug development pipeline is long, complex and expensive. Preclinical trials – the extensive testing and characterisation carried out before human trials are held – face significant challenges in mimicking the body’s environment and function adequately. Consequently, most drugs fail to pass the early stages of clinical trials on humans. Promising organ-on-a-chip (OoC) technology includes not only cells that form artificial tissues but also the fluids required to sustain and enable their functions. Funded by the European Research Council, the TOMAC project aims to enable OoCs that both enable physiologically relevant fluid flows and compatibility with standard operating procedures. The solution will control fluid flow with micrometre-sized, magnetic, hair-like structures that can rotate and oscillate in response to an applied magnetic field.
Objective
Currently, 90% of the drugs fail to pass clinical trials1. One of the key reasons is that the animal models used in the preclinical phase poorly predict the human response to the drugs. Organ-on-a-Chip (OoC) is a game changing technology as one of the alternative methodolgies to animal models. The heart of an OoC system is an ‘Organ-chip’: cm-sized devices with micro-channels and -chambers in which human cells can be grown to closely mimic human tissues. More and more evidence shows that OoCs are more representative models than animals. However, the industry adoption of OoCs is still very limited. OoC users and developers simply have to choose between either OoCs with physiologically relevant flow but not fit for standard operating procedures in the pharmaceutical industry, or OoCs that are compatible but less physiological because of the absence or inadequacy of the flow.
The TOMAC project offer s novel a solution called “Magnetic Artificial Cilia (MAC) pump”: a chip-sized modular and tubeless flow system that on one hand, eliminates manual handling and enables automation, and on the other hand provides physiological flow for a range of organ models. The technology behind MAC is based on micrometer-sized magnetic hair-like structures called Magnetic Artificial Cilia (MAC), which are inspired by cilia occurring in nature. The MAC are flexible micro-actuators that respond to a varying magnetic field (created by the actuation system) by rotating or oscillating, and thus create a controlled fluid flow.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
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Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC-POC - HORIZON ERC Proof of Concept GrantsHost institution
5612 AE Eindhoven
Netherlands