Scientists in an EU-supported project have developed a microfluidic chip that simultaneously analyses the reactions of several human organ tissues when they come into contact with candidates for new drugs. The ground-breaking device could save millions of euros in drug development costs.
One of the biggest challenges for pharmaceutical companies is reducing the multi-million-euro cost of drug development and shortening the time to market of medicines in order to fully exploit them before patents run out. This led the EU to back an early-stage research project, called Body-on-a-Chip (BOC), replacing the 2D cell culture conventionally used for drugs testing with a multi-tissue device that better mimics real-life conditions in the body, by combining several organ-specific 3D cultures into a single chip. Researchers then created a prototype BOC to assess the toxicological risk of new candidate compounds and their effectiveness prior to formal clinical testing.
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