Kidney-on-a-Chip Excellently Mimics Real Organ Functions to the Cellular Level
In the last 60 years, most scientific and technological contributions to drug research and development (R&D) have brought about major advances; however, the pharmaceutical industry has been facing increasing production costs and a decrease in efficacy of R&D process.
Kidney injuries from exposure to too many drugs are common among certain groups of patients, particularly those spending time in the ICU. Kidney injuries can also happen during drug testing, wounding subjects while eliminating candidate drugs far along their development pipeline.
In addressing this challenge, Draper engineers have developed a kidney-on-a-chip—a tiny 3-D structure that mimics features of a full-sized kidney—from human cells. By reproducing a kidney in a microfluidic device, and creating 96 of those kidneys in a device called PREDICT-96, Draper hopes to give scientists a better model to study the effects of disease and to discover new therapeutics for the kidney and other organs.
“Given that the kidneys play a major role in how drugs interact with the body, these organs take on a particular relevance for drug R&D,” said Joseph Charest, a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering who helps customers build artificial organ systems to test and refine
new drug therapies. “Nephrotoxity is a major cause of attrition during pre-clinical, clinical and post-approval states in pharmaceutical drug development. Even after drug approval, nephrotoxicity resulting from exposure has been estimated to contribute to 19 percent of all cases of acute kidney injury in critically ill patients. That’s a number we would like to lower.”Charest and his colleagues demonstrated that Draper’s microfluidic device can be used to reconstruct human kidney physiology and function at the cellular and tissue level and quantify dynamic drug-interaction with kidney tissue in real time.
The microfluidics platform addresses another common challenge for researchers “and that’s identifying ineffective drugs early in the discovery process,” said David O’Dowd, assistant director of Biomedical Solutions at Draper. “Used early in the drug discovery process, PREDICT-96 should allow developers to refocus resources on the strong candidates earlier and end unproductive research earlier, minimizing losses. What researchers want in a platform is to recreate human physiology in an accurate, reproducible, scalable, high-throughput, cost-effective and predictive format for testing candidate therapies for safety and efficacy. Draper does that with PREDICT-96.”
