America
Indian-origin researcher helps develop mini-heart on microchip
San Francisco, March 21
An Indian-origin
scientist with the University of California at Berkeley was involved in
growing a viable, pulsating heart on a microchip to improve drug
screening.
It is the latest human organ, after a lung, a liver
and a piece of intestine, replicated under laboratory environment. With
the help of this tissue created from stem cells, researchers can predict
if a certain medicine will have an adverse effect or how much dosage a
patient needs.
This method, if works, will replace animal models that do not mimic human responses, according to the researchers.
"Many
times doctors and researchers fail to predict a response to a certain
drug or medicine because of the inaccuracy of the models used, like
mice, that don't have the same reactions as human tissue," Anurag
Mathur, lead author of the study and post doctoral fellow at UC
Berkeley, was quoted as saying by Xinhua.
The study, which was
published by the journal Scientific Reports, was carried out at the
laboratory of bioengineering of professor Kevin Healy.
The tiny
heart, which according to Mathur is hardly the width of a human hair,
was created with human-induced pluripotent stem cells that can form many
different types of tissues.
These cells, once tricked into
forming heart tissue, were grown around a special silicon microchip with
cell and media channels that mimicked the heart's blood vessels.
Feeding this bionic heart a mix of nutrients to keep it alive,
researchers then could make the heart beat and work for up to a month.
"We
were able to run multiple tests during this period, so we proved that
this can be a viable solution to replace animal models," Mathur said.
"It began beating only 24 hours after being developed at a normal rate
of 50-80 beats per minute."
Drug screening using this device
could not only save lives, but also millions of dollars due to the high
cost of calculating the approximate dose needed for patients with heart
conditions.
"It takes about 5 billion US dollars on average to
develop a drug, and 60 percent of that figure comes from upfront costs
in the research and development phase," Healy said in a press release.
"Using a well-designed model of a human organ could significantly cut
the cost and time of bringing a new drug to market."
Researchers
see the future of medicine as completely personalised -- thanks to this
kind of organs-on-a-chip. All it takes will be a sample, the patient
then will be able to have his or her heart modelled in a lab with all
the tests done.
"Doctors will be able to predict how certain
drugs react on specific patients, thus preventing many illnesses and
loss of valuable time," Mathur said, adding that "I see this happening
in five years in most of the doctor's offices."