Building a human on a chip, organ by organ

Human “organs on chips” could be linked to make the ideal guinea pig, revolutionising the way drugs are tested and cancer is treated

Such organs on chips can be used to model how human organs function and respond to drugs, says Ingber. He thinks that they even have the potential to eliminate the use of animals in drug testing. “Animal testing is expensive and time-consuming, and animals are not always representative of humans.”

Still, Ingber points out that the chips can perform some roles that animal studies cannot. For instance, they could be personalised by building them from an individual’s own cells. In theory, a doctor could send tissue samples to a lab to test a potentially harmful therapy on such a chip before handing out a prescription. This would be especially useful for people with cancer, as the various therapies available can have very different effects on different people, Ingber says. “You could get a quick yes-or-no answer to whether a drug would work or not,” he says.

Personalised chips might also speed up clinical trials. “Someday it might be possible to shortcut clinical trials by using chips containing cells from different human populations that are known to respond differently to specific drug classes,” Ingber says.