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With the development of AI technology, "personalized medicine" has been frequently mentioned in recent years. The "precision", "efficiency" and "wisdom" symbolized by "personalization" make it an effective entry point to change the status quo of the medical industry. For example, intelligent guides can interact with patients, and intelligent monitoring equipment can help track and personalize medical services. So, can personalized medicine only be defined by AI medical products? I'm afraid not. Today, I will talk with you about personalized medical technology in another sense - "organ chip".
Break the whole into pieces, truly "personalized" medical care
When it comes to personalized medicine, the first thing that comes to our mind is genetic medicine, which is a customized medical model that is based on personal genomic information and combined with relevant internal environment information to design the best treatment plan for patients.
Although genetic testing and treatment can provide the basis for personalized medicine, there are also cases in which cancer and diabetes have been detected through genetic testing, and then precision medicine has been adopted to delay the disease. The association with diseases is difficult to determine, such as "ALS" (ALS), data show that only a small number of ALS are related to genetic defects, and the cause of 90% of sporadic cases is still unsolved.
Therefore, it is not very reliable to include the entire genetic program of the human body as a reference for personalized medicine. At this time, the emergence of organ chips has given people a new reference indicator.
The concept of "organ-on-a-chip" has a long history and was listed as one of the "Top Ten Emerging Technologies" by the Davos Forum in 2016. According to the Proceedings of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, an organ-on-a-chip refers to a microsystem of organ physiology built on a chip. Combined, it is possible to simulate and construct in vitro tissue and organ microenvironments containing complex factors such as a variety of living cells, functional tissue interfaces, biological fluids, and mechanical force stimuli, reflecting the main structural and functional signs of human tissues and organs.
To put it simply, it is to construct a simplified version of the biological tissues and organs in the human body in vitro, retaining only the characteristics of organ functions and human pathobiology. The significance of "organ chip" in personalized medicine is to divide the human body into parts, to replace the accurate diagnosis of "human body" with accurate diagnosis of "organ", and to provide more effective and targeted treatment.
By using patient-derived stem cells, the engineered construction of induced pluripotent stem cell-derived organ models can be used to make individualized disease risk prediction, drug efficacy evaluation, toxicology evaluation and prognosis analysis more accurate. At present, some scientists use the stem cells of specific patients to construct functional cardiac tissue to simulate the model of inherited heart disease.
In addition to realizing personalized medicine for humans, another obvious benefit of organ chips is drug testing. At this point, changes to animal testing will be revolutionary.
People have always used animals to test drugs, regardless of whether it is humane to use animals for drug testing. From the perspective of experimental accuracy, although animals share 99% of their genes with humans, the remaining 1% can still cause great variability, resulting in huge physiological differences between the two species. The same drug may react differently in animals and humans. Even small differences in expression will be amplified as the drug development process progresses, eventually leading to the failure of the entire project.
Because the "organ chip" is closer to the human body, it can be used more effectively for drug testing. On October 11, "Science Advances" reported a 3D method of making neurons and muscle tissue on a microfluidic chip. With this chip, scientists can test new drugs for "gradually frozen people".
Simulation, cost, connection... problems to be faced by organ chips
The concept of organ chip has been proposed for a long time, but the process of industrialization is very slow. To explore the reasons, it can be roughly divided into three points.
First, even the most advanced organ chips cannot fully represent the function of living organs. After all, all organs cannot exist independently of the body. Although it is constructive to divide the whole into parts, the whole is greater than the part, and it is impossible to replicate the diseased body only by relying on the organ chip, especially a series of functional changes caused by the endocrine environment.
Therefore, we must consider the overall relevance of the human body. In this regard, we can use a single chip to form a highly integrated 3D tissue-organ microfluidic chip system. The research team of Dalian University of Technology has developed such a chip system, which is composed of multiple modules stacked in sequence from top to bottom, integrating cells or cells such as intestine, blood vessel, liver, tumor, heart, lung, muscle and kidney. tissue, and has "digestive juice", "blood" and "urine" running through it.
In this way, the organ chip is like a building block. By stacking all the building blocks, a "human body building" can be created to the greatest extent, which can restore the functional environment in the human body and realize drug testing and other functions.
Second, organ chips are still a growing technology, and the immaturity of the industry chain will lead to increased costs. Oxford's CNBio uses a chip containing 12 tiny livers for toxicity testing of drugs. The current price for a unit is 22,000 US dollars. In fact, this price is much lower than that of animal experiments. You know, the price of mice to do the same experiment is $50,000.
However, this so-called "cheap" is still in question in the process of industrialization. At present, organ chips are mostly used in scientific research, and scientific research funds are sufficient to support the use of such tools, but our greater hope for organ chips is to apply to the medical treatment of ordinary people. Costs need to be controlled. Of course, with the improvement of the industrial chain, its advantages will gradually become prominent, and the cost problem will be solved accordingly.
Until then, we may be able to use 3D printing technology as an important complement to organ-on-a-chip methods. 3D printing technology will affect organ chips in at least two aspects, one is chip preparation, and the other is bioprinting. Especially in chip preparation, 3D printing has been able to produce chips with high resolution and complex structure, and also has the advantages of short production cycle, simple unit operation and low cost. Harvard Wyss Institute of Bioengineering and Harvard JohnA.Paulson Researchers at the Academy of Engineering and Applied Sciences have used 3D printing to create the first complete organ-on-a-chip with an integrated sensing system.
Finally, there is a common problem with microfluidic chips, that is, the connection between macroscopic samples and microchips is not easy. At present, the sample injection on the chip is mostly done manually, which has low efficiency and poor reliability, which can easily affect the viability of cells, thereby affecting the real-time detection of cell processes and biological characteristics. Therefore, we still need to develop more assistance. Flexible products, such as continuous sampling systems, guarantee automation, miniaturization and integration in preparation.
Since the development of personalized medicine, many technological achievements have been accumulated. With the continuous development of technology, we have also put forward more requirements for "personalization" and "precision". The significance of organ chips to human beings is that people can truly "prescribe the right medicine" without "damaging" other tissues. organ. With the deepening of research, organ-on-a-chip technology will be widely used in research in life science, medicine, pharmacy and other fields, bringing more possibilities for personalized medicine.