Why ‘Organ Chips’ Could Transform Cancer Treatment and Drug Testing?
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Cancer treatments do not always work as expected, leaving patients experiencing the side effects of chemotherapy without receiving the benefits. Now scientists are exploring whether tiny proxy organs created in the lab from a patient’s own cells might do a better job of predicting treatment success.
These proxy organs, also known as organoids, involve growing the patient’s cells into tissue that organizes itself.
In a more advanced technique, called an organ chip, organoids are grown on a tiny 3D structure that simulates blood flow. outcome? Lung tissue that expands and contracts on its own or heart cells that beat together.
Medical researchers say that unlike testing drugs in traditional ways – such as growing human cells flat in a dish, or testing on animals – organs on a chip can better capture the complexity of cancer development and human functions to predict which pharmaceuticals will work safely.
Here’s their recent progress amid moves by regulators and politicians in Canada and the US to use fewer animals in experiments.
A team from Montreal’s McGill University and Boston’s Harvard University successfully created organoids and a personalized, USB-sized organ chip for eight patients with esophageal adenocarcinoma, a cancer. high mortality rate,
The experimental device recreates and grows a patient’s tumor and surrounding tissue with fluid to test how it might respond to treatment.
“We took patients’ specific tumors, we created our own avatar of them,” said Lorenzo Ferri, director of thoracic and upper gastrointestinal surgery at McGill University Health Centre. “We showed that we can determine in four to six weeks which drugs are effective in that organ chip and that’s the timeline that is important for treating patients.”
Ferry’s team recently reported Journal of Translational Medicine In four chips, the treatment caused cancer cells to die, while in the other four, the cells survived.
In the small number of patients that have been tested so far, the results of the organ chip match perfectly with patients’ responses to chemotherapy and successful recoveries.
Asked how the findings might change his approach to treatment, Ferri said, “I think it’s really transformative.”
So far, the experimental technique has been used in only a handful of people. But Ferri said, the idea is to take the guesswork out of cancer care.
Allows personalized treatment
Donald Ingber and his colleagues at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering developed the patented chip technology for Ferry’s experiment.
The chip not only works by recreating the tumor, but also contains tiny channels for different types of cells and fluids that mimic blood and surrounding connective tissue. Overall, it shows how living cells expand and contract – important factors that are often missed in traditional laboratory tests.
Organoids and organ chips could offer a fast-track bridge between using laboratory animals to understand complex organ systems and clinical trial data from humans, said Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic, a university professor of biomedical engineering at Columbia University in New York.
Vunjak-Novakovic and colleagues used stem cells taken from A blood sample from a child suffering from cardiomyopathy, a disease of the heart muscle, to create heart tissue on an organ chip with a specific genetic mutation.
“He was a pediatric patient, (a) very young boy,” she recalled. After extensively examining existing medications, they found one that should work in their case and /9.6932124shared information With the boy’s cardiologist.
“These are small successes every now and then, but I’m hopeful that the whole field will really accelerate now that there’s so much support from the regulatory side and the funding side and also from pharma,” Vunjak-Novakovic said.
move away from laboratory animals
In September, the US National Institutes of Health announced the first dedicated organoid development center in the US to create standardized and accessible organoid models. Its purpose is to accelerate drug discovery and add more accurate tools for disease modeling, protecting public health and reducing reliance on laboratory animals.
Health Canada and Environment and Climate Change Canada also have a strategy.”change, reduce or refine Testing on animals such as rats, mice, pigs and dogs.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford has also called for new legislation to ban medical testing Continuous,
Dr. Ingber is responsible for hundreds of inventions. One, known as the “organ chip”, could revolutionize human medicine and drug testing.
Vunjak-Novakovic sees progress in the organoid field as a way to reduce the toxicity of drugs for anti-cancer treatments on nerve diseases and the heart.
For example, organoids were used to create safer and better treatments for cystic fibrosis, said Milica Radisic, a professor of biomedical engineering who holds the Canada Research Chair at the University of Toronto.
Radisic and Vunjak-Novakovic hold patents for the heart-on-a-chip technology.
By creating and maturing the tissue, Radicic creates organ chips to mimic the diseases of patients at Toronto General Hospital and the Hospital for Sick Children for uses such as drug testing.
Radisic said organoids and organs on a chip allow scientists to find what works for a specific patient.
“Tell me about me. That’s what people care about, right?” Radisic said.
Currently, Radisic said, experimental work aimed at solving the problem of heart disease for one family is in the proof-of-concept phase.
In another experiment, Ferri’s team at McGill showed that an existing cholesterol-lowering drug could make chemotherapy more effective in some patients.
In the future, cancer research like Ferri’s shows the potential to tailor treatments according to a person’s genetic makeup, said Kalina Kamenova, a bioethicist who studies the public communication of stem cell science.
“In clinical practice, a big issue in the future will be how do we scale up this research?” Consider the cost, said Kamenova, founder and research director of the Canadian Institute for Genomics and Society. “How do we ensure that this brings benefits to everyone in society, to everyone who needs this kind of treatment?”
To begin answering those questions, Ferri’s lab is already receiving courier shipments of tumor samples from patients in Ontario and Manitoba, with plans to add British Columbia.
Ferri acknowledged that the technology currently costs up to $30,000 per patient sample. Radisic said robots growing organoids could take over the difficult daily maintenance work of keeping cells alive under sterile conditions, reducing costs.
Opinions vary on whether and when organ chips may be able to replace the use of animals in biomedical research.
“The animal welfare aspect is often overlooked,” Radisic said. He said there is a “real opportunity” to actually cut the number of animals used in drug discovery over the next 20 to 30 years.
