Skip to main content

Advancing medicine with Patient-on-a-Chip

By

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 can be reprogrammed into induced pluripotent stem cells which can be differentiated into any organ cell type each bearing unique genetic fingerprint of the patient.

These patient cells can be integrated with organ-on-chip devices to check the response of the treatment by exposing the cells to a single or combination of drugs. Such patient specific response can be obtained without actually administering a drug which may cause harm.

Potential of Precision Medicine.

When a patient is sick, clinician can will be able to develop a patient specific treatment to better understand the unique biology and response for the best possible outcomes. Organ-on-a-Chip technology will provide better information about how a patient respond to a specific disease condition and subsequent line of treatment. 

With the advancement of Science precision medicine will involve preventative measures as well. It's not hard to imagine the integration of clinician's expertise, data generated by devices, power of AI along with Organ-on-Chip technology. 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular

Frugal Science: Science for all

By
 Science is not just about knowing but also about experiencing.  Today with the boon of technological advancement we have easy access to information and knowledge which is merely a click away. Science is largely about learning and it comes through the experience. So, it's more important how you can make the experience of science more accessible to a lot of people around the world.  The actual experience of science is utilizing scientific tools to make your own discoveries. Prof. Manu Prakash at Stanford University is in a quest of how can we make scientific tools that are so affordable, which are like buying a pencil from a shop, So what it would mean if a scientific tool is as accessible as pencil? What you would actually do, would you sketch with it or would you write a poetry with it, what exactly is the end of that for science? Prakash Lab do this in different fields but mainly focusing on the microscopic world. So how do you make the microscopic world easily visible,...
Post a Comment
Read more

How Catastrophic is 1 Degree Celsius?

By
Climate change is one of the biggest challenges we face today, and the stakes could not be higher. The world has become keenly aware of the problem, and around the world, people are setting goals to solve it. To avoid the worst effects of a warming world- which will be catastrophic-humans need to stop adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.  Since 1850 global average temperature has risen by 1 degree Celsius. That may not sound like a significant number, but it is.  Why? Let's find out. One degree is average. Many places on earth have gotten much warmer than that. Some areas in the Arctic have already warmed by 4 degrees. If the global average temperature increases by one more degree (total increase of 2 degrees), the coldest nights in the Arctic might get ten degrees warmer, and the warmest days in Mumbai might get 5 degrees hotter.  Wonder how do we get here? Everything we do is related to fossil fuels: Coal, Oil, and Gas, which are full of carbon that releases carbo...
Post a Comment
Read more

Remember to Sleep, Sleep to Remember

By
Sleep occupies nearly a third of our lives, but many of us give surprisingly little attention to it. This neglect is often the result of major misunderstandings. Sleep isn't lost time or a way to rest when all of our work is done. Instead, it's a critical function during which our body balances and regulates vital systems, affecting respiration and controlling right from circulation, growth, and immune response.  But, we care more about that test which we have tomorrow morning, right? One should certainly not; it turns out that sleep is also very crucial for the brain, with a fifth of the body's circulatory blood being channeled to it when you are drift off. And, what goes on in our brain while we sleep is an intensely active period of restructuring, which is crucial for memory function.  According to psychologist Herman Ebbinghaus, we usually forget 40% of new material within the first 20 minutes, known as the forgetting curve. But fortunately, this loss can be prevented b...
Post a Comment
Read more