Studying drugs and diseases with “body-on-a-chip” models

An organ-on-a-chip, also known as a microphysiological system, is an in vitro tissue that mimics the physiology of human organs, tissues, or diseases. However, due to the complexity of organ-organ interactions, the understanding of multi-organ systems demands a rigorous quantitative approach that has not yet been fully actualized.

Now, researchers are combining single organ models to build multi-organ systems, which could be conceptualized as miniaturized human bodies. These “body-on-a-chip” systems attempt to model the human body to test drugs and chemicals, as well as to learn more about diseases.

The latest review by Sung et al. summarizes existing mathematical modeling strategies for multi-organ systems. Author Michael Shuler said that he hopes their review urges readers to consider the important role of mathematical modeling in the development of such systems.

The article catalogs previous research on the application of several different scaling methods, pharmacokinetic models, and physiologically-based pharmacokinetic models for multi-organ systems. Each method works well in some scenarios, but not others. The authors cautioned that while these efforts have successfully combined three to four organs in a functional system, there is still a long road until these systems can fully match the complexity of a complete human body.

Shuler hopes this review will encourage the use of multi-organ systems to test the efficacy and toxicity of drug candidates, cosmetics, foods, and other chemicals. In the future, as researchers successfully add organs to the systems, this technology may more accurately predict how our bodies may react to specific drugs and diseases.

Source: “Strategies for using mathematical modeling approaches to design and interpret multi-organ microphysiological systems (MPS),” by Jong Hwan Sung, Ying Wang, and Michael L. Shuler, APL Bioengineering (2019). The article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1063/1.5097675 .