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196 || AWSAR Awarded Popular Science Stories - 2019
free these innocent animals from any inhuman treatment?
Drug trail failures are no less critical than the Chernobyl catastrophe (the worst disaster in nuclear power generation
that took place in Chernobyl
nuclear power station in the
Soviet Union in 1986). The
question that now arises is, how
can such incidents be stopped
from occurring in the future?
What should be the corrective
measures from our side?
This is where the organ-
on-chip (OOC) technology
comes into the picture. This interdisciplinary domain is an
amalgamation of lab-on-chip
technology and cell biology.
This field is still in its infancy
and is extremely challenging,
but nonetheless holds the
potential to revolutionize the
way drugs are discovered
and tested. Simply put, OOCs
are microfluidic chips for cell
culturing. Commonly, they have multiple channels and layers. The channels are lined with living human cells interfaced with endothelial lining. The whole idea behind designing and developing such a chip is to mimic the in-vivo conditions present inside human organs. These chips can potentially replace traditional animal and human testing. One of the advantages of using a micro-channel is that it supports 3D cell growth, which gives better and reliable results as compared to 2D cell cultures.
This technology is a step towards personalized and precision medicine. One of the miraculous applications is taking cells from the body of one person and reprogramming them inside these chips by mimicking the microenvironment found inside
the human body. By cell reprogramming, we mean reverting the mature cells into induced pluripotent stem cells. It goes without saying that this technology is extremely challenging
but we all know that in science everything begins as a heresy and ends as a dogma. Throughout the world, rapid progress is taking place in this domain with many startups establishing business based on organ-on-chip manufacturing. The organ-on-chip market is huge and is predicted to grow exponentially in the near future.
I work in the Bio-MEMS lab at IIIT-Allahabad (Indian Institute of Information Technology) under the supervision of Dr Amit Prabhakar. We have developed all the facilities required for photolithography within a very short span of time. As I mentioned earlier, cell biology is an integral part of OOCs, in this regard we have
been seeking help from the Special Centre for Molecular Medicine (SCMM), Jawaharlal Nehru University. Since most of the drugs have been withdrawn from the market due to their hepatotoxicity, hence we decided to work on liver-on-chip. For the past two years, our team has been working to develop a low-cost liver- on-chip platform for drug and toxicity testing. This chip is simply a microfluidic device in which we grow and co-culture various types of liver cells. For starters, we are using the HepG2 cell line. An organ-on-chip basically consists of three components:
1. Top channel layer
2. A porous membrane
3. Bottom channel layer.
Both the top and bottom channel layers
are made up of polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS),
For over half a century, animals like rats, mice, rabbits, dogs, and monkeys have been exploited for various laboratory procedures especially drug testing. While these animal models are a fair representation of the complex biological systems, they fail to reproduce the response that a drug would illicit inside the human body. Also, the animal models are not very trustworthy when the pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics of a drug is concerned.