WASHINGTON — Wyss Institutes Founding Director Donald E. Ingber, M.D., Ph.D., kicked off SLAS2015 by focusing on the engineering of human "Organs-on-Chips" to a filled room of SLAS attendees on Feb. 9.

Ingber stated that the Wyss Institute is fulfilling their mission of transforming medicine and the environment by developing breakthrough technologies and facilitating their translation from the top to the marketplace. The Wyss Institute — launched six years ago with $125 million invested and the "largest gift in Harvard's history" — is the only place this innovation could happen.

Researchers, along with Ingber, have created this innovative technology. Organs-on-a-Chip is a cell culture device — crystal clear with flexible polymers and the size of a computer memory stick — that contains hollow channels lined by living cells, and tissues that imitate human cellular response far more effectively and realistically than Petri dish cultures.

Two of the channels are separated by a thin, plastic, porous membrane that is lined on one side with human lung cells from the air sac and exposed to air. Human capillary blood cells from the lung are placed on the other side with medium flowing over their surface to imitate blood flow. From there, a vacuum applied to side channels deforms this tissue-tissue edge to re-create the way human lung tissues physically expand and retract when breathing.

"We took a game-changing advance in microengineering made in our academic lab, and in just a handful of years, turned it into a technology that is now poised to have a major impact on society." Ingber said.

With the help of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and National Institutes of Health (NIH), the team have developed more than 10 different Organs-on-Chip models including human lung, gut, kidney and bone marrow chips. "For us, we’re trying to be inspired by the human design principles," Ingber said.

Their research has also developed on-chip models of human diseases, including pulmonary edema and inflammatory bowel disease. The goal is to ultimately have the entire body and then link multiple chips in order to capture interactions between different organs and eventually recreate a "human [body]-on-a-chip."

The structure would be able to imitate the inhalation of a medication, for example, into the lungs and then later, how it’s broken down in the liver. "We’ve done this diffusion model on a mouse and found exactly the same thing," Ingber said.

Comparing human and animal organs-on-chips is a great example of what the science industry calls "predictive science" — where researchers harness the power of technology to better understand how a medication might ultimately impact patients and speed the delivery of new ones.

These new advances could help move towards more predictive and useful measures of the efficiency and safety of potential new drugs, chemicals and cosmetics, all while reducing the need for animal testing and could also potentially provide a way to develop personalized therapies in the future.