Tha datachip -Human liver cells are dotted across the chip
Photo Credit: Moo-Yeal Lee/Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Animals are widely being used by cosmetics and pharmaceuticals industry to test chemicals and drug candidates for their toxicity and activity, before being used by the humans. This process is not an easy task as it is getting harder and harder everyday with the emerging laws, higher cost and with the huge amount of chemicals being synthesized. Therefore an effective, faster and a much cheaper alternative for animal-based toxicology screening was a major requirement for a long time; because, deployment of newly synthesized pharmaceuticals and cosmetics, without pre-screening, can be very dangerous for the usage by human.
Researchers at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the University of California at Berkeley, and Solidus Biosciences Inc. have come up with a promising solution for the problem. They have developed two biochips, the datachip and the metachip that when combined, can replace the animal-based screening.
Datachip consists up to 1,080 three-dimensional human cell cultures. This represents the actual arrangement of cells within the organs and can be used to screen the potential toxicity of various chemicals and drug candidates, in a faster rate than when done with animals.
Metachip mimics the metabolic pathways occur within the liver. Liver is the place where chemicals and drugs are processed. Therefore the metachip facilitates to determine how different chemicals and drugs behave within the human body. It is said that by varying the ratio of enzyme level of the metachip, a personalized chip can also be developed, which can support the determination of the affect of drugs to different people.
“When coupled with the new DataChip, the two chips could someday be used to determine the levels and combinations of drugs that are safe and effective for each individual patient” says co-lead author and Solidus Biosciences co-founder Douglas S. Clark, professor of chemical engineering at the University of California at Berkeley.
Read the original article ; Category : Biochemistry, Engineering
