Very often promising therapeutic drug candidates developed as a result of expensive animal studies prove to be ineffective or even dangerous when tested in humans. Although lab animals may have similar anatomical features as humans, their physiology, metabolism, and genetic diversity can be quite different.
Biomedical researchers at the University of Rochester https://www.rochester.edu are addressing the problem through a novel form of personalized medicine. They are developing an alternative organ-on-a-chip technology by using tissue samples from a human patient to mimic how a disease or disorder may occur in that patient.
Researchers are specifically studying how to build technology to predict the course of tendon injuries in individual patients and specifically use technology to address scarring from a tendon injury especially after surgery to repair the damage. To the best of the researchers’ knowledge, the Rochester Project will be the first organ-on-a-chip platform designed for modeling scar formation in tendons.
The research team includes sensor scientists, orthopedic surgeons, and immunologists that are trying to help clinicians better predict whether a patient is likely to develop debilitating scar tissue, and if so, then determine which therapeutic drug will work best for their patient.
Researchers are working closely with the University of Rochester Medical Center’s Center for Musculoskeletal Research along with the Department of Biomedical Engineering https://www/hajim.rochester.edu/bme to develop a multidisciplinary approach.
The research funding is supported by a $3.8 million grant from NIH’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), https://ncats.nih.gov which seeks to streamline the process by which new treatments and cures can be delivered to patients.
The grants are being administered through the program “Clinical Trials on a Chip, being led by NCATS https://ncats.nih.gov in conjunction with other NIH Institutes and Centers, including the National Cancer Institute, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases.
A major goal for funding this grant program is to develop 3-D platforms engineered to support living human tissues and cells and mimic complex biological functions of organs and systems which hopefully will be better able to determine which patients are most likely to benefit from an investigational therapy prior to initiating clinical trials.