To help streamline the therapeutic development pipeline, NIH www.nih.gov in collaboration with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) www.darpa.mil and FDA www.fda.gov, is leading an initiative to improve the process for predicting whether drugs will be safe in humans.
The National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) www.ncats.nih.gov led by NIH’s Institutes and Centers has awarded $17 million for 2014 to support the next phase of the “Tissue Chip for Drug Screening” program. So far, NIH has committed nearly $76 million over five years for the program launched in 2012.
The “Tissue Chip for Drug Screening” initiative is the first interagency collaboration launched by NCATS to develop 3-D human tissue chips that model the structure and function of human organs such as lungs, liver, and the heart.
Currently, more than 30 percent of promising medications have failed in human clinical trials because they were determined to be toxic despite promising pre-clinical studies in animal models. Tissue chips are a newer human cell-based approach and may enable scientists to predict more accurately how effective a therapeutic candidate would be in clinical studies. These human tissue chips could also teach scientists about disease progression, enabling researchers to better prevent, diagnose, and treat such conditions.
The scientists intend to combine tissue chips into an integrated system that can mimic complex functions of the human body. Today, scientists are able to create human tissue chips using techniques that can result in miniature models of living organ tissues on transparent microchips.
Ranging in size from a quarter to the size of a house key, the chips are lined with living cells and contain features designed to replicate the complex biological functions of specific organs. This should enable scientists to use these models to predict whether a candidate drug, vaccine, or biologic agent is safe or toxic in humans
To find more information on the NIH award recipients, go to www.ncats.nih.gov/tissue-chip-awards2014.html. The awardees include Columbia University, Duke University, Harvard, MIT, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Northwestern University, University of California Berkeley, University of Pittsburgh, University of Washington, Vanderbilt University, and Washington University in St. Louis.