
Human body-on-chip platform could speed up drug testing - trott
https://www.europeanscientist.com/en/research/human-body-on-chip-platform-could-speed-up-drug-testing/
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hprotagonist
If you can really, truly get liver-on-a-chip to work, it's going to positively
change drug testing forever and will be the first huge win for tissue
engineering.

You can throw away animal models for tox screens forever, and that's great
news. It will save vast amount of time and money. By using a much better proxy
model for humans (slices aren't organs, they have different rheological
characteristics and morphology, but they're a damn sight better than mice),
you'll wash out candidates earlier and faster, and hopefully enrich the
pipeline.

Slowly but surely, and it's good to see steps in this direction.

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refurb
Meh. There are plenty of human cell line derived assays for things like
membrane permeability, liver toxicity, etc.

Those assays are super helpful, but don't replicate what happens in humans.
They are good boxes to check, and can help weed out compounds early, but just
because a compound passes the assay doesn't guarantee something weird won't
pop up in humans.

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kovek
Is it possible that these proxies you mention could weed out compounds
incorrectly? For example, if we have a liver proxy that fails on drug A, is it
possible that drug A will work fine in the human body provided that there’s a
lot of other processes that could contribute to the liver?

~~~
refurb
Absolutely. That's the flip side of in vitro and animal testing. You might see
a negative signal and stop development, only to find out that it can't be
replicated in humans.

The cell line assays replicate much of what happens in humans, but not all of
it, in particular the interactions between different tissues. For example, a
drug might be toxic in a liver assay because a reactive metabolite damages the
cells. But in an actual human, you might never see those high of
concentrations in the liver or there may be a process (like glutathione
adducts) that deactivates the metabolite and prevents cell damage.

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echelon
We need to clone decephalized humans and livestock.

With thousands of brainless bodies kept alive on life support, you have test
subjects for a limitless number of experiments that would have never been
possible before. You also create a never-ending O negative blood supply and
organ harvesting program.

It the case of decephalized animals, you also get cruelty free meat. And
that's how you bootstrap the program and port it to the human model.

There would be a lot of political pressure, but this would be a space-age jump
in supporting fundamental biological research, supplying renewable body parts
and tissues, and keeping us healthy and young.

We need to do it.

If I ever get Elon Musk money and power, I'm doing this instead of rockets.

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amankl
I've seen a lot here, but this takes the cake. I'm not sure if that post is a
troll, assuming it is not:

Half of the energy and time of any decent person with morals goes into
stopping smart psychopaths like that poster from doing whatever the heck they
want.

I'm not religious, but it makes me wonder if the church is actually needed to
keep those people in check.

~~~
echelon
> I'm not sure if that post is a troll

It's not. I've had this idea for some time, and I'm absolutely serious.

We already grow human cells in culture. It's like growing an extremely
delicate plant. The HeLa cell line is derived from Henrietta Lacks, and she's
been dead for some time. There's nothing wrong with growing and manipulating
cells like this. Eukaryotic cells are as brainless as prokaryotic ones. This
is how we do basic research.

We create multicellular tissue cultures, often using the extracellular matrix
from cadavers. Again, basic research. Nothing wrong, nobody hurt.

If you can grow a human body without a head and brain, how is that ethically
different from a plant? Please explain it to me. As long as you guarantee the
brain never develops, it's ethically cleaner than telling a white lie.

Personhood requires a brain. Period.

I don't believe in a soul. So that's not an issue either.

Next explain to me why we shouldn't do this, because headless clones will cut
organ transplant waiting lists to zero and help us cure cancer, diabetes, and
every other human disease that doesn't directly involve the brain.

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lewispollard
> Personhood requires a brain. Period.

Well, it requires a complex nervous system.

How many neurons are there outside of the brain?

How many neurons create a sensing, feeling being?

It's an assumption to say that the only way for consciousness around organic
feeling to exist is through a brain. We don't know that.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I was under the impression that the nervous system outside the brain is only
propagating signals back and forth, and all the actual compute is localized in
the brain. If that's true, then the GP's idea makes sense; if it isn't, then
that's a can of worms we need to sift through eventually.

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dvt
Does anyone have a layman-accessible explanation for how exactly this works?
My last biology class was freshman year of college, but I find the "body-on-
chip" startups incredibly interesting. I take it this is different than
"growing" organs via stem cells?

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vikramkr
Basically, when you are growing organs or organoids (or 3d printing organs)
with stem cells (which are used for organ on a chip too), you're actually
trying to recreate the physical organ itself in it's original
structure/function. You can imagine in the extreme the end result of trying to
do this with a lung would be actually having a working lung that you could
transplant into a person.

Organ on a chip is less about making a lung, amd more about making a very
controllable device that that has all the relevant behaviors and
characteristics of a lung, so you can experiment with it. The end result of
this might be a bunch of chips all connected to eachother with all sorts of
tubes, and different cells grown in each tube with exact stimuli of all sorts
being applied by an automated system. The goal wouldn't be to make a long you
could put into a person. Rather, the goal would be to make something that,
when you put a drug in through one of the tubes, would tell you exactly what
would happen to the drug and how the lung of a real person would react if you
were to give them the drug.

The lines can get blurred, organoids on a chip, 3d printed organs used for
research purposes, etc. But in general, (and you'll see this in how the
different companies market themselves) growing organs is trying to get
functional organs that could eliminate the need for a donor for an organ
transplant, and organ on a chip is trying to get perfect research tools to
eliminate the need for mice in research.

~~~
sanarothe
This reminds me very much of manufacturing quality testing, where you do
initial DoE and validation builds to develop knowledge of the process.
Eventually the knowledge of procc behavior at boundary conditions is known
well enough that you can start to use alternative process monitoring
approaches, like building a representative mockup of in-vitro conditions that
represents the actual use conditions.

It doesnt have to be the same vector, just the same eigenvector.

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TravisSc6tt
So they're basically trying to simulate humans? What a world we live in

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BurningFrog
Step by step, we are becoming obsolete...

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xiphias2
Actually for drug research that's a good thing

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econcon
I've heard nearly any implant you put inside body has negative impact and this
is also true for titanium implants which is seemingly inert and harmless
metal.

How many people their body with some industrial chip, I'll never use anything
like this unless my life depends on it.

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wgrover
This isn't a chip for implanting inside the body; this is a microfluidic chip
that replicates some body systems in the laboratory.

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monkeydust
OK why the need for a physical chip, why not replicate in software?

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anamexis
Because we can't effectively model the behavior of human tissue in software.

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eximius
We can't even effectively model basic chemistry. We can't a priori tell you
what color a chemical will be, much less many of its other properties.

