Abstract

Human Tissue Chips for Drug Development, Disease Modeling, and More…

Kevin Healy, Jan Fandrianto and Selfia Halim Distinguished Professorship in Engineering, University of California, Berkeley

Our work has emphasized creating both healthy and diseased model organ systems, we call microphysiological systems or ‘tissue chips’, to address the costly and complex drug discovery process. The average time to develop and launch a new drug in the United States is 10-15 years, and costs ~ $2-5b. The poor efficiency and high failure rates are attributed to the heavy reliance on non-human animal models employed during safety and efficacy testing that poorly reflect human disease states. With the discovery of human induced pluripotent stem cells, we can now develop tissue chips to be used for high content drug screening, disease modelling, and numerous other applications. While tissue chips are poised to disrupt the drug development process and significantly reduce the cost of bringing a new drug candidate to market, tissue chip technology is much more robust and creates a whole new paradigm in how to conduct biological science, and advances medicine in revolutionary ways. Ultimately, the vision is to reduce or eliminate the use of animals in drug discovery, and conduct ‘clinical trials’ in patient-specific tissue chips that can accommodate variations in genetics, environment, and lifestyle.