Lab-On-A-Chip (2)

PHI´s partner Harvard University har en fristående institution vid namn Wyss Institute.
https://wyss.harvard.edu/
Namnet är taget efter dess största finansiär, Hansjörg Wyss. Filantropen Wyss donerade nyligen ytterligare medel för institutets forskning.

Entrepreneur and philanthropist contributes $131 million more to the institute that bears his name

The Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University announced today the latest gift of $131 million from its founder, entrepreneur and philanthropist Hansjörg Wyss, M.B.A. ’65.

Wyss institute är en auktoritet vid forskning kring Lab-on-a-chip tekniken. De har ytterligare utvecklat tekniken till att exempelvis handla om Human Organs-on-Chips. Denna teknik gör att djurförsök kan minimeras i forskning där djur oftast måste ingå.

Microchips lined by living human cells that could revolutionize drug development, disease modeling and personalized medicine

Clinical studies take years to complete and testing a single compound can cost more than $2 billion. Meanwhile, innumerable animal lives are lost, and the process often fails to predict human responses because traditional animal models often do not accurately mimic human pathophysiology. For these reasons, there is a broad need for alternative ways to model human diseases in vitro in order to accelerate the development of new drugs and advance personalized medicine.

Wyss Institute researchers and a multidisciplinary team of collaborators have adapted computer microchip manufacturing methods to engineer microfluidic culture devices that recapitulate the microarchitecture and functions of living human organs, including the lung, intestine, kidney, skin, bone marrow and blood-brain barrier, among others. These microdevices, called ‘Organs-on-Chips’ (Organ Chips), offer a potential alternative to traditional animal testing. Each Organ Chip is composed of a clear flexible polymer about the size of a computer memory stick that contains hollow microfluidic channels lined by living human organ-specific cells interfaced with a human endothelial cell-lined artificial vasculature, and mechanical forces can be applied to mimic the physical microenvironment of living organs, including breathing motions in lung and peristalsis-like deformations in the intestine. They are essentially living, three-dimensional cross-sections of major functional units of whole living organs. Because they are translucent, they provide a window into the inner workings of human cells in living tissues within an organ-relevant context.

Denna film visar hur tekniken fungerar.



Om PHI samarbetar med Wyss specifikt kan undertecknad inte bekräfta, men sannolikt har arbetet med att utveckla chipet till HoloMonitor koppling till institutet. Mig veterligen har inte Harvard annan fakultet med kompetens inom LOC.

LOC har nu fått den uppmärksamhet man runt tidigt 2000-tal visade tekniken. Men som i förra inlägget förklarade var marknaden inte mogen för dess entre.
Idag kan man läsa artiklar med följande text :
- Lab-on-a-chip industry adapts manufacturing technologies from other industries to rise quickly and gain perspective on the commercial opportunities ahead.

Microfluidic devices, also known as lab-on-a chip devices, tend to be disposable cartridges that contain some or all the chemistry needed for the performance of an assay. Some microfluidic devices require no additional instrumentation. One such device is the common lateral flow assay (LFA) device, which may display a color change after sample is added. Other microfluidic devices do require additional instrumentation. For example, they may require delivery of a cartridge to an optical or fluorescence scanning instrument for results to be read. In all cases, the small size of the cartridge and small volume of reagent requires dependable error-resistant manufacturing processes to ensure product quality.

Manufacturers of digital media may play an important role in the scale-up of microfluidics and lab-on-a-chip design as well. Technicolor, most notable for its contribution to film coloring and in-home entertainment, is one of the most novel players entering the emerging market space for injection-molded microfluidics and lab-on-a-chip technology.

The microfluidics/lab-on-a-chip industry differs from the optical media industry, Town says, with respect to standardization. In the optical media industry, specifications have been standardized the world over, but microfluidic devices and form factors will differ depending on the chemistry and science employed on the device, requiring smaller batches and additional assembly line retooling with each new device design.

Another manufacturer in the microinjection molding industry is Plastic Design Corporation (PDC). Located in Scottsdale, AZ, PDC is also a manufacturer of plastic microtiter well plates. PDC’s engineer, president, and founder, Mark Kinder, explains that the company’s microfluidics business “has grown faster than our microtiter plate business and represents approximately 60–65% of our labware business.” This market segment primarily serves the diagnostic industry. “Most of that,” Kinder points out, “is trying to match a DNA strand through the diagnostic.”
“What we are trying to do is miniaturize the whole lab process,” he continues. “The days of petri dishes and test tubes are gone. As we miniaturize it, the handling becomes more difficult, so why not incorporate it all on one platform, so that you don’t have to handle it after sample prep.”

Även denna artikel  
Revolutionizing the Treatment of Cancer With Lab-on-a-Chip
News   Jul 24, 2019 | Original story from the American Institute of Physics
 
Pathology labs mounted on chips are set to revolutionize the detection and treatment of cancer by using devices as thin as a human hair to analyze bodily fluids. The technology, known as microfluidics, promises portable, cheap devices that could enable widespread screening for early signs of cancer and help to develop personalized treatments for patients, said Ciprian Iliescu, a co-author of a review of microfluidic methods for cancer analysis published in the journal Biomicrofluidics. This image shows circulating tumor cells trapping on a porous membrane using microfluidics (scale bar is 10 micrometers). Credit: Florina Silvia Iliescu

2017 gjorde man ett lyckat försök med LOC-tekniken. Där man använde sig av en metastas från en cancer och erhöll kunskap man tidigare inte hade.

This device consists of two blocks, one studded with chambers representing organ sites, and a second block with a microfluidic channel running through it, representing a blood vessel. A porous PDMS membrane is placed between these blocks to act as a culture substrate, and tumour cells are then co-cultured into one of the organ chambers, alongside cells native to the organ being modelled. The invasion of neighbouring organs through the bloodstream can then be observed by tracking the tumour cells’ progress from the top block to the bottom block, and then back into the top block in a separate chamber. A similar system, modelling colonic cancer metastasis to the liver, was developed by Alexander Skardal and colleagues. This system was constructed using a hyaluronic acid-based hydrogel system, which could not only demonstrate the migratory capabilities of the tumour cells but also proved highly dynamic, allowing both pharmacological and mechanical manipulation. This introduction of extra layers of complexity and the easy modulation of such systems means that microfluidic devices have immense potential in this field of research. Devices investigating this process in more detail, focussing on individual tumour interactions, have also been created. This means that metastasis can be examined to a degree of precision simply not possible without microfluidic innovation.
With such potential, one may ask what the next innovations in on-chip models will be. In a recent review, David Caballero and colleagues at the University of Minha suggest that integration with other technologies will allow the full benefits of microfluidics to be seen in tumour modelling. Integration of models with advanced imaging techniques, such as fluorescence or live-cell microscopy, could permit spatial and temporal modelling of tumours to a level of detail never before achieved. This integration has already shown potential in applications as broad as imaging vesicle trafficking and C. elegans larvae development. Microfluidics also will have a role to play in the emergence of personalized medical research. The genetic heterogeneity between metastatic tumours, even within a single patient, will require high-throughput but clinically relevant analysis techniques. Microfluidic pharmacological screening against these variable cancers will not only speed up care but will make the research process far more efficient and accurate.

För 3 veckor sen publicerades en artikel som utförligt berättade om LOC´s fördelar.
Breakthroughs in Lab-on-chip allow them to detect faster,cheaper and less invasively 

Och nyligen (Juni) berättades att Roche visat intresse för tekniken.

Multi-Organ Lab-on-a-Chip for Cancer Drug Testing

Researchers at Hesperos, Inc., a biotech firm based in Florida, have collaborated with Roche and the University of Central Florida to develop a multi-organ lab-on-a-chip system for drug testing. The device includes human organ-derived tissue constructs that allow for the efficacy and side-effects of anti-cancer drugs in various organs to be tested in a way that does not involve laboratory animals. The technique is another step for lab-on-a-chip devices in making preclinical testing easier, less expensive, and more humane.
Lab-on-a-chip devices for drug testing are an active area of research, with numerous devices being reported in recent years. The promise of such technology is substantial, as it could drastically reduce the need for laboratory animal testing for new drug compounds and could make such testing faster and less expensive. In the future, the technology could provide drug safety and efficacy data that are more relevant to human patients than those achieved using experimental animals.

Förutom Roche är följande bjässar i startgropen för LOC-tekniken.
BD,Agilent Technologies,Danaher,Bio-Rad,Abbott Laboratories,PerkinElmer,IDEX,Thermo Fisher Scientific,Cepheid

Även Sverige har bra kompetens inom området.
PHI´s granne och kompis Lunds Universitet utbildar forskare till LOC-kompetenser. 
Introduction to Lab-on-a-chip Systems

Sen har vi Uppsala Universitet med The Embla Group

Ni noterar väl sista rutan om Singelcellsforskning? PHI-knutna forskare har tidigt identifierat möjligheterna med singelcellsforskning,som utförs ypperligt med HoloMonitor.

För att återkoppla till del 1 av detta inlägg.
Harvard och PHI samarbetar med att ta fram ett HoloMonitor-anpassat chip som ger PHI möjlighet att kliva in på denna växande marknad. Spännande va? 😎