Research >> Organ-on-a-chip >> Pharma and toxicology applications
Current drug screening methods still heavily rely on 2D cell culture assays or animal models. While 2D cell culture assays fail to replicate the 3D structure and complexity of tissues in vivo, animal models fail to capture the human-specific response to drugs due to intrinsic differences in anatomy and physiology. As a result, new drugs come to market slowly, and their development is enormously expensive. Part of the problem is that we lack good in vitro models, and so our understanding of tumor behavior in a complex 3D environment is limited and drug screens are ofen misleading. In addtion, since in vivo most drugs are delivered to the targeted tissue through the circulatory system rather than directly imposed on the cultured tissue, incorporating the vasculature into tumor models can better mimic drug delivery to provide the precise information like drug dosage as reference in further clinical trials.
Thus, we developed a 3D microtumor model supported by perfused human microvasculature for anti-cancer drug screening., which could be used to identify drugs that target cancer cells directly through the measurement of tumor size, or indirectly through effects on the vasculature to starve off tumor growth through the characterization on the morphology of microvascular network. Based on this work, we further developed an arrayed vascularized microtumor platform for large-scale drug screening applications and successfully demonstrated its capacity to identify both anti-angiogenic and anti-cancer drugs from a small library of compounds. |
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Selected Publications
1. Duc T. T. Phan#, Xiaolin Wang#, Brianna M Craver, Agua Sobrino, Da Zhao, Jerry C Chen, Lilian Y.N. Lee, Steven C George, Abraham Lee* and Christopher Hughes*, A vascularized and perfused organ-on-a-chip platform for large-scale drug screening applications, Lab on a Chip, 2017, 17(3), 511-520.
2. Agua Sobrino#, Duc T. T. Phan#, Rupsa Datta, Xiaolin Wang, Stephanie J. Hachey, Mónica Romero-López, Enrico Gratton, Abraham P Lee, Steven C. George and Christopher C.W. Hughes, "3D microtumors in vitro supported by perfused vascular networks," Scientific Reports, 2016, 6: 31589.
1. Duc T. T. Phan#, Xiaolin Wang#, Brianna M Craver, Agua Sobrino, Da Zhao, Jerry C Chen, Lilian Y.N. Lee, Steven C George, Abraham Lee* and Christopher Hughes*, A vascularized and perfused organ-on-a-chip platform for large-scale drug screening applications, Lab on a Chip, 2017, 17(3), 511-520.
2. Agua Sobrino#, Duc T. T. Phan#, Rupsa Datta, Xiaolin Wang, Stephanie J. Hachey, Mónica Romero-López, Enrico Gratton, Abraham P Lee, Steven C. George and Christopher C.W. Hughes, "3D microtumors in vitro supported by perfused vascular networks," Scientific Reports, 2016, 6: 31589.