IND04-01 Modernizing drug discovery & development with organ-chip technology

ABSTRACT

There is no doubt that scientific progress has accelerated the discovery and development of innovative medicines, a phenomenon acutely visible through the rapid advancement of vaccines against SARS-CoV-2. Outside of dealing with a global pandemic, the process of drug discovery and development remains painfully slow, extremely costly and can, despite appropriate measures, result in patient-safety concerns. Because only around 12% of drugs that enter clinical trials make it to approval, governments in the United States and Europe are taking steps towards modernizing the process of drug discovery and development. Whilst several solutions will ultimately be required, there are growing calls for the utilization of 21st century tools within drug discovery pipelines. One such tool is organ-on-a-chip technology that employs microfluidic systems engineering to recapitulate in vivo cell and tissue microenvironments in an organ-specific context. This is achieved by recreating tissue-tissue interfaces and providing fine control over fluid flow and mechanical forces, optionally including supporting interactions with immune cells and microbiome, and reproducing clinical drug exposure profiles. This seminar will showcase the Emulate Organ-Chip platform and will present the findings of the first of its kind Organ-Chip study which utilized the pharma consortium Innovation and Quality (IQ) roadmap for developing in vitro liver models for the prediction of drug-induced liver injury1. Using 780 Liver-Chips across a test set of 27 small molecule drugs, data will be presented indicating that the Liver-Chip has a 87% sensitivity and 100% specificity, thus making it a highly predictive tool compared to animal models and prior preclinical in vitro models. The seminar will complete with an overview on how such a tool can be implemented into drug discovery workflows whilst providing adopting organizations a significant productivity gain.