Body on Chip-A Distant Dream or an Emerging Reality?
Journal Title: Drug Designing & Intellectual Properties International Journal - Year 2018, Vol 1, Issue 4
Abstract
We are currently facing a global health challenge regarding the way we discover and develop new drugs. Small biotech companies, as well as large pharmaceutical corporations, spend increasingly more money on the classical route of drug development, and it fails more often than it succeeds. Consequently, some diseases are not being treated and patients who are in dire need of new therapies are not receiving them. The classic tools available for testing whether a drug will work efficiently and safely or fail before we reach advanced stages of human clinical trials and spend millions of dollars, do not predict in a robust way. The realization that our bodily cells are dynamic organisms under constant mechanical stress and movement emphasizes the notion, although not new, that cell cultures in 2D Petri dishes for cancer research do not fully reflect their in-vivo microenvironment [1-3]. In addition, current drug research still depends largely on time-consuming and costly animal studies that often fail to predict human trial efficacy and toxicity [4]; and that raise ethical questions regarding the sacrifice of experimental animals. These issues pose major challenges to the development of experimental research using the in-vitro model. An emerging field, with high potential, which could bridge the abovementioned gaps, is microfluidics technology-organ-on-a-chip. Microfluidics technology enables the manipulation of fluid flow at the microscopic scale. The capability to use small volumes of samples and reagents flowing through specially designed micro-channels embedded into a chip provides a new and improved platform for wide areas of research, ranging from physics, through chemistry and biology [5,6].
Authors and Affiliations
Benzion Amoyav, Ofra Benny
Keywords
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- EP ID EP587170
- DOI 10.32474/DDIPIJ.2018.01.000118
- Views 188
- Downloads 0
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