The potentials of lab-on-a-chip technology

Despite suggestions that the FDA isn't interested in lab-on-a-chip technology, advancements in this field are showing increasing potential for the healthcare sector, says Lu Rahman.

Earlier this year Spectator Health ran the headline, This ‘lab on a chip’ knows when you’re ill before you do. Will the regulators approve it?

The piece by Benedict Spence focussed on the fact that scientists from Rutgers University claim that health issues could be identified through the analysis of blood and sweat using a lab-on-a-chip.

According to Spence, the device is small enough to fit in a wearable device and is able to detect the biomarkers of various diseases with 95% accuracy – this, says the developers, will increase to 100% in a short space of time.

However, Spence believes that FDA regulators won’t allow the device to be sold to the public as putting its approval stamp on ‘consumer health monitoring technology’ throws up problematic issues such as data protection and misdiagnosis.

Despite this, the development of lab-on-a-chip devices is advancing.

Harvard's Wyss Institute recently launched the human Organ Chip project to mimic human influenza infection and pathogenesis in vitro, and identify new drug leads that target host response factors.

The development of anti-influenza drugs has been limited by the fact that animal models do not accurately reflect the infection mechanisms influenza viruses engage in humans. The Wyss Institute's team will use lung small airway and alveolus chip devices lined by living human lung cells that they previously showed to reproduce normal lung physiology as well as diseases that affect these regions, including chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), asthma and pulmonary edema.

The lung chips are microengineered devices the size of a computer memory stick that contain two parallel hollow channels, each less than 1mm wide, separated by a porous membrane. Lung alveolar cells are cultured on the porous membrane in one channel, and lung capillary endothelial cells are grown on the opposite side of the same membrane in the second channel to recreate the characteristic tissue-tissue interface found within these lung regions. With air streaming through the lung epithelial channels and growth medium continuously streaming through the 'vascular channels', the team can maintain, study and manipulate the re-engineered organ units over the course of weeks to months. 

"Virtually all existing anti-viral drugs target the virus itself, however, the ability to study influenza infection in human lung chips also allows us to study the host response to infection in a highly controlled way," said Donald Ingber, principal investigator (PI) and Wyss founding director.

Meanwhile researchers at Purdue University are creating a device that they hope will help identify risk factors that cause breast cancer.

The device, known as risk-on-a-chip, is a small plastic case with several thin layers and an opening for a piece of paper where researchers can place a portion of tissue. This tiny environment produces risk factors for cancer and mimics what happens in a living organism.

“We want to be able to understand how cancer starts so that we can prevent it,” said Sophie Lelièvre, a professor of cancer pharmacology at Purdue.

Cancer is a disease of gene expression, and organisation of genes is specific to a particular species and organ, which means it wouldn’t be useful to perform this study on rats or mice. Lelièvre needs a model that will mimic the organ in question. She teamed up with Babak Ziaie, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue, to create the device.

The risk-on-a-chip is based on an earlier cell culture device developed by Lelièvre and Ziaie to study cancer progression. To modify it for prevention, Ziaie plans to add nanosensors that measure two risk factors: oxidative stress and tissue stiffness.

Oxidative stress occurs as the result of diet, alcohol consumption, smoking or other stressors, and alters the genome of the breast, aiding cancer development. The risk-on-a-chip will simulate oxidative stress by producing those molecules in a cell culture system that mimics the breast ducts where cancer starts.

Tissue stiffness has been found to contribute to onset and progression of breast cancer. The team will measure stiffness within a tunable matrix made of fibres, whose density is relative to stiffness.

Breast cancer is particularly difficult to prevent because multiple risk factors work independently or in combination to promote disease onset. To account for this, the risk-on-a-chip will be tailorable to different groups of women at risk.