Organ on a chip? Scientists test drugs on tiny, artificial lung

CHICAGO (Reuters) - U.S. researchers have begun testing drugs using a microchip lined with living cells that replicates many of the features of a human lung, a technology that may one day help improve drug testing and reduce researchers' dependence on animal studies.

In 2010, researchers at Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering developed the so-called lung-on-a-chip technology that mimics the function of air sacs called alveoli, which transfer oxygen through a thin membrane from the lung to the blood.

For drug companies, the technology offers a way to better predict how drugs will work in people, ultimately reducing the cost of drug development by identifying problems before drugs are tested in clinical trials.

"Major pharmaceutical companies spend a lot of time and a huge amount of money on cell cultures and animal testing to develop new drugs, but these methods often fail to predict the effects of these agents when they reach humans," Dr. Donald Ingber, whose study was published on Wednesday in Science Translational Medicine, said in a statement.

Now the Wyss team is putting its artificial lung to the test, using the device to recreate pulmonary edema, a condition that causes fluid to leak into the air sacs of the lungs, and then treating it with an experimental drug from GlaxoSmithKline.

The device, which is about the size of a memory stick, is made of a flexible polymer that contains hollow channels.

These channels are divided by a thin, permeable membrane lined on one side with human lung cells and on the other with tiny blood vessel or capillary cells that are bathed in fluid to simulate blood flow. A vacuum is applied to recreate the way human tissue stretches during breathing.

For the study, the team treated the device with interleukin-2 or IL-2, a cancer drug that can cause pulmonary edema, a deadly condition in which the lungs fill with fluid and blood forms clots.

When injected into the blood channel of the device, the drug caused fluid to start leaking across the membrane, reducing the amount of volume of air in the other channel. Blood plasma crossed into the air channels and started to clot.

Dr. Geraldine Hamilton, co-author on the paper and the senior lead for the organs on chips program at Wyss, said the study is "providing us with a very exciting proof of concept for our ability to use organs on chips to create human disease models."

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Organ on a chip? Scientists test drugs on tiny, artificial lung