Emulate and Janssen use Thrombosis-On-Chips in collaboration

The collaboration formed to use Organs-on-Chips to better predict human response in drug development processes.

Emulate, Inc. announced that it recently formed a research collaboration with Janssen Biotech, Inc. The collaboration will deploy Emulate’s Organs-on-Chips platform across certain Janssen programs to better predict the potential human response of drug candidates and improve the drug development process.

The public disclosure of this collaboration coincides with the achievement by Emulate and Janssen scientists of the first functional demonstration of Emulate’s Thrombosis-on-Chip platform.  The collaboration, which was facilitated by the Johnson & Johnson Innovation Center in Boston, utilizes Emulate’s Organs-on-Chips to advance the clinical goals for three Janssen R&D programs at the stages of drug candidate design and selection. 

Using the new Thrombosis-on-Chip that models human response in an engineered living microenvironment, the Emulate and Janssen research teams are evaluating the potential for drug candidates to cause thrombosis, a potential side effect of certain drug classes such as immuno-therapeutics and oncology drugs. 

The Thrombosis-on-Chip is an example of the application of the range of different Organs-on-Chips within Emulate’s platform for providing more predictive data on potential human response to drugs that will enable the design and selection of drug candidates that have a higher potential of success in human clinical trials.

In the collaboration’s R&D program, the Thrombosis-on-Chip emulated the conditions and various physiologic parameters involved in clot formation in the human body and provided a mechanistic understanding of the factors implicated in thrombosis.

The Emulate and Janssen teams, in collaboration with researchers at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, plan to publish comprehensive data related to the Thrombosis-on-Chip research in a peer-reviewed journal. 

Geraldine A. Hamilton, Ph.D., president and chief scientific officer of Emulate, said: “For the first time, Emulate’s Organs-on-Chips have demonstrated the ability to recreate the key drivers of thrombosis within a chip in a way that mirrors what happens in the human body. This is one example in our collaboration with Janssen that shows how we are using Organs-on-Chips to identify safety and efficacy issues more reliably and earlier in the drug development process, delivering meaningful value by more successfully evaluating drug candidates for the benefit of patients.”