Acute Radiation Syndrome (ARS) is an illness affecting a combination of organs, occurring when the body receives a high dose of radiation over a short period of time especially after a nuclear or radiological incident. The first symptoms of ARS will start within minutes to days after the exposure and last for minutes up to several days, and may come and go.
The affected person usually looks and feels healthy for a short time, but then they will become sick again and may even experience seizures and coma. This seriously ill stage may last a few hours or up to several months.
Developing medical countermeasures to treat ARS is a high priority for the U.S government but presents complex scientific challenges. ARS may involve many organ systems which makes it hard to study candidate medical countermeasures that target the radiation effects on one specific organ system in animal models. Also certain candidate medical countermeasures cannot be effectively studied in animal models because their activity is specific to humans.
The new technology “Organs-on-Chips” consists of tiny microfluidic devices lined by living human cells that mimic complex organ physiology. This technology can be used instead of animals to evaluate the efficacy and safety of medical treatments for ARS.
A team at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard received a $5.6 million grant award from FDA to use its “Organs-on-Chips” technology to test human physiological responses to radiation and to evaluate drugs designed to counter the effects. This effort is also being supported by a team in the Vascular Biology Program at Boston Children’s Hospital.
Organs-on-Chips mimic the functions of tissue structures present in living organs, such as in the lung, heart, and intestine. The technology replicates the interactions between the living tissues within human organs on chips the size of a thumb drive. Under the contract Wyss Institute scientists will develop models of radiation damage in lung, gut, and bone marrow on Organs-on-Chips and then use these models to test candidate medical countermeasures.
In addition to funding from FDA, the Organs-on-chips technology was developed with funding from DARPA and NIH.
For more information, go to http://wyss.harvard.edu.