‘Human body’ on a chip to help drug development

Scientists at Tel Aviv University, Israel, and Harvard University, USA, have created organs-on-a chip that may be a better predictor of drug response and also help speed up drug development. The team built the multiple organ microchips to resemble the shape and functions of living human organs such as lungs, liver, intestines, kidneys, skin and brain. They also created a machine that can be programmed to maintain up to 10 organ chips and transfer fluids to mimic human blood flow between the different organs (see video). “We took a game-changing advance in microengineering made in our academic lab, and in just a handful of years, turned it into a technology that is now poised to have a major impact on society,” said Donald Ingber of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard.