This device is just one of more than two dozen tissue chips in development as part of the Tissue Chip for Drug Screening program, a initiative launched in 2012 by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), a center within the US National Institutes of Health that aims to foster translational science. The cell and animal models that drug companies use to test their compounds cannot always predict how humans will react to those drugs, and so even medicines with impressive preclinical data can sometimes founder once they reach patients. The hope is that these chips, which contain human cells, will help pharmaceutical companies to weed out toxic compounds early, and so save time, money and lives.
Chips such as Himmelfarb's have been in the works for years, but drug companies have yet to widely adopt this type of technology. To speed up the process, in 2014, the NCATS enlisted help from the IQ Consortium. The consortium is a nonprofit collaboration between pharma and biotech companies to develop scientific and technological solutions that benefit patients, regulators and the research and development community. Over the past two years, a special IQ Consortium working group composed of members from 15 drug companies has provided insight into how the chips might be used and how they might be validated for toxicity testing. That validation process is just beginning: researchers at two NCATS-funded testing centers in Texas and Massachusetts will assess about two dozen different chips representing a variety of organs. Outside of this government-led effort, private tissue-chip companies are working one on one with pharma to develop and validate their own products, in the hope of pushing the technology forward.
This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution