Drug development is stuck in an innovation gap, in which it incurs staggering expenses and takes many, ten to fifteen, years to get a drug to market, furthermore, during the process many animals are sacrificed in preclinical work, and in the end many times the results from the animal studies does not accurately predict what will happen in humans, resulting in failures, delays, and recalled drugs. Organ-on-chip technologies have the potential of closing this gap and have the potential of curtailing the high experimental costs and complexities associated with in vivo studies. Eventually these tools could evolve into next generation tools for therapeutic validation and development.
The project proposal initially proposed that by using a multi-compartment microfluidic platform, while integrating synthetic biointeractive hydrogels into and between the compartments, to produce a multi-organ-on-a-chip which recapitulates organ-like functions in each compartment and a vascular similar conduit system between compartments to produce an early stage human on-a-chip for future therapeutic assessment and development applications. Successful production of this platform will improve the therapeutic and pharmaceutical development pipeline, while also minimizing our reliance on animal testing in accordance with the needs and guidelines within the EU. The long-term implications of this work would result in increasing the throughput of therapeutics, directly minimizing the cost of drug development and increasing the efficiency. This would lead to lowered economic burden to produce drugs, as well as quicker turn around, having large implications on improving the quality of life in globally.
This project shifted over the period of research, with a focus on developing a microfluidic system that incorporated a newly developed, proprietary elastomeric thermoplastic as the housing chamber for the organ-on-chip device. This shift focused on moving away from the more traditionally used polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS). PDMS while very useful as a versatile prototyping material, is not as well suited for scaled up manufacturing and has some limitations in terms of drug absorption and has been implicated in impacting some characteristics of biological samples. This new direction of research focused on evaluating a new material to increase the manufacturability of organ-on-chip devices and moving away from the more traditionally used PDMS material. Effectively the goal was to have a technology that once validated, would have greater potential for scaled up manufacturing, and effectively increasing the potential dissemination of the technology to other research and corporate lab settings.
The development of a more robust, manufacturable OOC technology platform, will have positive implications on improving the therapeutic pipeline to generate, novel therapeutics while minimizing the failure and inherent cost of these failures in developing these therapeutics by creating a commercially viable toolset for therapeutic development.
