It’s a devastating memory-wasting disease that has continually seen failure after failure in the clinic, but now a Florida medtech company is hoping it can seek out better Alzheimer’s treatments by creating a multi-organ “human-on-a-chip” model.
These chips are typically lined with human cells and are designed to mimic the chemical and mechanical characteristics of their target tissue.
Such intricate devices are made possible through the use of microchip fabrication processes, which are able to create tiny channels that, in the case of the lung-on-a-chip for instance, house the artificial lung and also mimic inhalation and exhalation.
Hesperos is looking to create a deeper model, incorporating more organs to better understand how treatments are working, hence the human-on-a-chip moniker, rather than just an organ.
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Specifically, it’s a three-organ system that includes brain cells (cortical neurons) and functioning liver and blood-brain-barrier constructs, as well as recirculating blood and cerebral spinal fluid surrogates.
The hope is that by mimicking key parts of the human body, they can see how it reacts to new drugs being passed through it, including the how it works on the liver (to assess toxicity) and how it passes the blood-brain barrier.
Hesperos researchers will develop models using both healthy brain cells created from pluripotent stem cells, and cells with different mutations consistent with the disease.
Further down the line, the company plans to assess long-term effects in its models, as well as real patient samples, to test its “viability as a tool to inform real-time, personalized treatment decisions as part of precision medicine.”
To help kick this off, the company has now been handed a phase 1 grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Institute on Aging in the hope that it “can realistically mimic the biology of Alzheimer’s disease (AD), and the effects of potential new therapies under realistic human physiological conditions.”
Hesperos founders Michael Shuler, Ph.D., and James Hickman, Ph.D., are some of the pioneers of organ-on-a-chip technology, and their company says it is the first to create pumpless microfluidic multi-organ systems with fully integrated physiological functions, such as blood circulation and nerve connections.
“There are estimated to be 50 million people in the world with dementia—that’s more than the population of Spain, and it is projected to nearly triple by 2050. Many of the people with dementia have AD, resulting in an urgent need for new, effective treatment options for the disease,” said Hickman, Hesperos’s chief scientist and a professor at the University of Central Florida’s Hybrid Systems Laboratory.
“Development of a low-cost, easy-to-use system to assess drugs for AD would improve efficacy and toxicological evaluations for patient specific treatments, providing a significant benefit to the drug development community and patients.”