(428c) Area 15B/PD2M, Pharmaceuticals - Plenary: Human Multi-Organ-on-a-Chip Platform for Pharmaceutics

Drug discovery is a lengthy, risky, and expensive process hampered by systemic side effects. Thus, identification of potential liabilities of new molecular entities has become essential in safety assessment throughout drug discovery and development. However, there is no effective in vitro assay currently available for accurately detecting cytotoxicity at early stages of drug development, whereas animal models used at later stages are often ineffective at predicting human responses to candidate drugs. Therefore, there is an increasing demand for improved in vitro models that can better predict the physiological responses of the human body to novel pharmaceutical compounds, particularly with respect to tissue/organ toxicity. With the development of the microfluidic organs-on-a-chip systems, multiple physiological and biochemical parameters of the organ models representing their in vivo counterparts can now be simulated. However, while many drugs can create chronic cellular reactions or delayed cell responses, there is a serious unmet demand of analytical methods for long-term, continual, sensitive analysis of cell-secreted biomarkers from an organ model. In tackling these major challenges facing the pharmaceutical industry, we have innovated a multi-organ-on-a-chip platform integrated with a novel sensing system capable of continual monitoring of physicochemical parameters and soluble biomarkers to enable long-term analysis of drug toxicity in microfluidic organs-on-a-chip. This talk will focus on the development of such an integrated platform, from engineering biomimetic organoids using bioprinting/microtechnologies to sensor integration and automated system operations over extended periods of time.