Transforming Drug Development With Groundbreaking Organ-On-Chip Tech

UNLOOC’s innovative human tissue-mimicking microchip-based devices revolutionise the drug development game, reducing animal testing and supporting personalised medicine.

An international team of researchers supported by the EU-funded UNLOOC(opens in new window) project is developing organ-on-chip (OOC) systems that simulate human organ responses, providing faster, safer and more reliable drug testing alternatives. Their technology will help advance drug development, create safe cosmetics without animal testing and offer new insights into diseases.

Keeping animals out of drug development
Traditionally, before a drug can be tested on human subjects in a clinical trial, it is first tested on animals. However, besides the ethical issues pertaining to animal testing, animal models also pose many challenges, such as the low likelihood of findings being applicable to human populations and the high failure rates of clinical trials. UNLOOC’s technology is intended to mitigate these challenges through the direct use of human cells.

By replicating the physiological and functional properties of human organs on a microstructured platform, the project’s OOC technology will offer a better understanding of their function and biochemical-level interactions. It will also make it possible to test the efficacy and toxicity of different drugs. “These biological models, created within microchips, could eliminate the need for animal testing in the preliminary evaluation of pharmaceutical compounds and cosmetic ingredients,” reports an article(opens in new window) posted on the website of UNLOOC project partner HUN-REN Centre for Energy Research, Hungary. “At the same time, they enable meaningful assessment of the reliability and effectiveness of such tests.”

Adding women to the equation
The technology is also bridging the gender gap in medical research, making it possible to test drugs on female subjects – a group often sidelined in trials. The historical omission of women in drug testing failed to account for the fact that drugs tested on male bodies would not work the same way in females, since women have different hormonal cycles, metabolic rates, immune responses and fat distribution. The way they respond to medications therefore differs from men.

Since cells from target groups or even individual patients can be implemented in UNLOOC’s OOC systems, the project is bridging the gender gap and also making personalised medicine possible. “In the future, the tissue-mimicking devices developed within the UNLOOC project could facilitate faster and safer drug testing by analysing samples from individual patients. In the longer term, the results achieved may also support the personalised design of pharmacotherapeutic protocols, representing a direct extension and translation of the project,” reports the article.

UNLOOC merges microfluidics, biological application, microelectronics, AI and key digital technologies to form future products and forge new pathways in drug development. The project is focusing on five scenarios. These include off-the-shelf 3D organ models replicating human diversity, the development of market-ready single-organ and multi-organ smart OOC multi-well plates, and the design of artificial epithelial tissue to assess transdermal drug delivery, skin penetration, absorbance and toxicity. UNLOOC researchers are designing a blood brain barrier platform that is affordable for biomedical research labs and scalable for research organisations. They are also developing an advanced lung-on-a-chip platform to better assess the safety of new drug candidates. The UNLOOC (Unlocking data content of Organ-On-Chips) project ends in 2027.

For more information, visit UNLOOC project website (https://www.unlooc.eu/)