We have a global health problem today : drug development is way too expensive, too long and isn’t efficient enough.

Today, drug development usually takes around 15 years, including 5 years to discover and extract the molecule, 5 years to test it on different animals : first on rodents, then on pigs or monkeys, to determine the amount of drug an organism can assimilate without side effects. And finally, 5 years of human clinical trials.

This leads to a lot of animal suffer, for a contested result, since, most of the time, animal models fail to predict what will happen in a human organism. Some drugs can have a very positive effect on animals, and no effect at all on humans, or, even worse, negative effects.

Organs-on-chips could provide researchers a new tool to test their drug, enabling them to stop using animals as models, and that could, for sure, shorten the experiments to assess the perfect drug uptake. We are able to devise different organs-on-chips, such as a heart, a liver, kidneys, lungs, gut and bone marrow, a company is even engineering a brain-on-chip that could be a relevant model of the human brain’s physiology. And we are able to link up all those organs to form a sort of human body-on-a-chip.

Researchers could also test their drug on different kind of populations, because a negligible genetic variation between two populations can actually lead to a very different effect on their health. For example, Latinos are more likely to suffer from diabetes than Asians. So a drug which side effect might create diabetes would be very dangerous if used in a Latino population.

We could also test drugs on cells from different age groups, because the effect of a drug on a baby is very different from its effect on a adult man. Organs-on-chips can help scientists to create different “versions” of their drugs, for the different kind of populations in the world.

We are on the cusp of using personalized medicine, which means your doctor could take off some of your stem cells, and send them to a specialized company that would put them on different chips in different conditions so that the stem cells would differ to become lung cells, neurons, atrocities, gut cells, bone marrow cells, heart cells… And scientists would then connect all your different organs-on-chips together, and inject the drug you want to test in a vessel that would be liking up all the chips, and would observe how your tissues respond to that drug, and what kind of side effects this drug creates on you.

And this is very important for the people who suffer from particular diseases, such as allergies, immunodeficiency, or people that are already following a daily treatment like old people : we could test the effect of the different drugs working together on your organism : medicinal interactions, that often lead to very dangerous side effects, especially if they take place in a fragile organism.

In a nutshell, organs-on-chips are about to revolutionize medicine and the way pharmaceutical industries test and distribute their drugs in the world.