It will come as no surprise to anyone in the business of drug development and translational research to hear that animal studies suffer from severe shortcomings. The traditional mouse study often can't detect the kind of simple toxicities that will scuttle a program later on. Mouse models help, but animal biology in the lab is still far removed from human targets, one reason why we're often treated to cancer cures which never get far in human studies.
Enter the organoid, stage left. A Bloomberg writer stepped in to review a "blob of tissue" being used to test new diarrhea therapies at Johns Hopkins, one of a number of organoids that promise to do the work of animals, only cheaper, faster and far more accurately. Tied to the experimental use of human cells on a chip in preclinical drug testing, and you have a highly anticipated push--largely funded by NIH--to turn translational research on its head. And Big Pharma players like Pfizer ($PFE) and Merck ($MRK) are paying close attention.
Using human cells in drug testing isn't a new idea. But about a month ago NIH gave the movement a hard shove forward, putting up $70 million to support a slate of projects at institutions like Harvard and MIT which aim to develop organs on a chip. And a transatlantic team of investigators landed about $37 million in funding from DARPA to create a system intended to mimic the human body's reaction to new drugs. By pinpointing toxicities early in the process the investigators believe they can save developers billions of dollars.
"If companies are better able to get signals of toxicity early and abandon toxic compounds early, that then saves them money," Kathy Hudson, acting deputy director of the NIH's National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, tells Bloomberg.
- here's the article from Bloomberg