28 December 2019
‘Reproducing human and cross-species drug toxicities using a Liver-Chip’, delves into the research by Emulate Inc. with Janssen Pharmaceuticals, Astra Zeneca and the Wyss Institute at Harvard on the development of liver chips using species-specific cells to predict drug induced liver toxicity and reduce drug attrition rates. On the same lines of drug induced toxicity, Matsui et al. worked on developing 2D model systems with human iPSCs to predict cancer drug-induced cardiotoxicity, described in their paper ‘Cell-based two-dimensional morphological assessment system to predict cancer drug-induced cardiotoxicity using human induced pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes’. Finally for this edition, ‘Human colon-on-a-chip enables continuous in vitro analysis of colon mucus layer accumulation and physiology’ by Sontheimer-Phelps et al. from the Wyss Institute, reports on their model which recapitulates the structure and composition of the native mucus layer of the human intestine – enabling in-depth study of this important defensive barrier. [Read more…]