Body-on-a-Chip: The new frontier in Drug Discovery

Join ARCS OC on this field trip to UCI to attend the Biosciences Department Dean´s Distinguished Lecture.

Wednesday, February 20, 2019 • 4:00 PM
Crystal Cove Auditorium, UC Irvine Student Center

Reception to follow the lecture at 5:00 PM

Featuring Christopher C.W. Hughes, Ph.D. Chair and Professor Molecular Biology and Biochemistry University of California, Irvine

Watch: Professor Christopher Hughes previews his Dean's Distinguished Lecture.

About the Lecture
Identifying effective new medicines is time-consuming and expensive. Ideally, drugs are highly specific, having great efficacy and minimal toxicity, however this is rarely the case. Current drug pipelines follow very similar trajectories: simple cell-based assays reveal promising compounds that are then tested in mice, and, if these studies are successful, lead agents progress into first-in-man studies, and finally full-scale clinical trials. Unfortunately, fewer than 1 in 7 drugs entering clinical trials make it to market. Two major problems with this pipeline can be identified: the cell-based assays are too simple, not reproducing the complexity of cells in the body; and mice are not men – mouse metabolism and drug sensitivities are often very different to our own. 

Body-on-a-Chip technology aims to solve these problems. Three-dimensional “mini-organs” can be created in the lab that better model how cells behave in the body, and human cells can be used to capture human-specific responses. Numerous studies have now shown that these systems can perform better in modeling how drugs behave in people than both traditional cell-based assays and mouse testing. Moving from the lab to the clinic, we are now taking tumors from cancer patients and growing them in these platforms. Our long-term goal is to use this technology to identify the optimal combination of drugs to treat each individual patient – truly personalized medicine. Dr. Hughes is a world leader in the field of microphysiological systems (body-on-a-chip) technology and will describe how these revolutionary models are set to change how drugs are discovered, tested and prescribed.