Science and Curiosity

Innovating with Organ-on-a-Chip technology. It is well known that patients responds very uniquely to various drugs and chemicals. For instance, a drug may be effective for a patient while it makes another one more ill. For a long time, we had no test to check the effects and response of these medicine or line of treatment individually for each patient . Patient-on-a-Chip holds the potential to advance the field of precision medicine and provide  clinicians with better information which can accurately predict patient's response to medications and treatment.    Organ-on-a-Chip technology can be used to recapitulate true-to-life biology outside the human body. These advanced systems can create micro-environment where cells exhibit unprecedented level of biological functions and facilitates control over complex human biology and disease mechanism which arduous with other techniques.  Scientist can harvest cells from the skin or blood of the patient. These cells...

Animal models provide great complexity compared to simple cell culture, but still, they struggle in recapitulating the human  physiology. Despite these shortcomings, animal models have been continuously used for preclinical studies for over a century.     For a significant amount of time, preference for animal models was a necessity as they were the best options for preclinical trials. However, with advancements in microfabrication technology, microfluidic Organ-on-a-Chip has started to offer excellent alternatives in recent years. Organ-on-Chip systems use human tissues from patients. Hence, they can more accurately mimic the numerous in-vivo human physiological mechanisms, which brings us closer to personalized medicine. As many as 90% of drugs entering human clinical trials fail to get approval from the FDA. Sometimes they are not much effective, and many a time, they are toxic. The preclinical models should be able to identify these lacunas even before these drug...