Next-generation drug testing on chips

Improvements to tiny body-on-a-chip devices could lead to next-generation pre-clinical testing of drug toxicity

"Body-on-a-chip" device is a novel in vitro human model without the use of people or animals for drug discovery. This chip allows recapitulating the side effect of anti-cancer drug on human heart cells before expensive clinical trials.

Researchers at Kyoto University’s Institute for Integrated Cell-Material Sciences (iCeMS) in Japan have designed a small ‘body-on-a-chip’ device that can test the side effects of drugs on human cells. The device solves some issues with current, similar microfluidic devices and offers promise for the next generation of pre-clinical drug tests.

The Integrated Heart/Cancer on a Chip (iHCC) was used to test the toxicity of the anti-cancer drug doxorubicin on heart cells. The researchers, led by iCeMS’s Ken-ichiro Kamei, found that, while the drug itself was not toxic to heart cells, a metabolite of the drug resulting from its interaction with cancer cells was.

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Kyoto University: Next-generation drug testing on chips

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