Dysfunction of epithelial barriers as a result of pathological states or drug-induced toxicity can lead to life-threatening conditions and halt drug development at all clinical stages. And therefore, in vitro models that better reflect in vivo epithelial barrier (patho-)physiology are urgently required to predict adverse drug effects.
An attempt in this direction by MIMETAS, a company developing organ-on-chip technology out of Leiden, The Netherlands, and Roche, the giant pharmaceutical company, has yielded 350 perfused gut tubes that replicate the basic structure of an intestine within a matter of days.
Mimetas managing director Paul Vulto says “With 350 gut tubes and over 20,000 data points measured, this is the largest organ-on-a-chip dataset ever published. It demonstrates that 3D cell culture under perfusion flow isn’t necessarily complex to do. In fact, every cell biologist is now able to work with OrganoPlates and reproduce our results.”
“Scientists at Mimetas and elsewhere around the world are developing stunning 3D cell culture models in the OrganoPlate platform every day,” Vulto added. “The fact that one can culture tubules, blood vessels, and tissue co-cultures in 3D, without artificial membranes and with an unprecedented imaging quality, enables researchers to study human tissue biology in a completely novel way. We are
proud to support these fantastic scientists in their search for ever more physiologically relevant tissue models. We are now making this technology available to every scientist in the world.”The Organoplate or the gut tubules in the study were polarised and leak-tight after four days in culture, demonstrating an increased expression of specific transporters and receptors. These grown tubes were leak free and an imaging system was used to detect whether leaks developed following the introduction of different chemical compounds. Obviously, if the compound damages the tubes that are made of human cells, it will probably do the same in a human gut.
MIMETAS and Roche believe that this technology is ready for introduction into laboratories to speed up drug testing, and maybe even helping to reduce the dependence on animal models during some of the process.
The study appears in the journal Nature Communications.
