Developing miniature surrogate human organs, coupled with highly sensitive mass spectrometry technologies could one day revolutionize the way new drugs and toxic agents are studied. It could also change how we do studies as science will step beyond animal or Petri dish testing. According to scientists, there are huge benefits in developing drug and toxicity analysis systems that can mimic the response of actual human organs.
Development of the “Advanced Tissue-Engineered Human Ectypal Network Analyzer” or known as ATHENA, was funded by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency www.dtra.mil in collaboration with the Los Alamos National Laboratory http://lanl.gov, Harvard University www.harvard.edu, Vanderbilt University www.vanderbilt.edu, Charite Universitatsmedizin in Berlin, www.charite.de/en/charite CFD Research Corporation www.cfdrc.com, and the University of California in San Francisco www.ucsf.edu .
Some 40 percent of pharmaceuticals fail their clinical trials and there are thousands of chemicals where the effects on humans are simply unknown. Providing a realistic, cost effective, and rapid screening system such as ATHENA with high throughput capabilities, could provide major benefits to the medical field and offer more accurate screening to achieve a greater chance of clinical trial success.
ATHENA project team is nearing the full integration of the liver, heart, lung, and kidney. Each organ component is about the size of a smartphone screen and the whole ATHENA body of interconnected organs will fit neatly on a desk.