Prajakta Dandekar, in Mumbai, is part of a relatively small group of scientists around the world working to ensure fewer animals are used in pharmaceutical research using human-on-a-chip technology.
I had a bad case of the cramps yesterday. As I usually do when this happens, I reached out for my strip of painkiller tablets and popped one. Within a couple of hours, I was fine again. Now I performed this monthly routine (if you’re not sure what menstrual cramps are about, go here) quite unthinkingly, but it turns out that I should count myself lucky that I’m getting away with it. Though this pill, and any other is easy to obtain over-the-counter, not everyone reacts the same way to it. For some, it may not work at all, and for an unfortunate handful it may result in adverse side-effects like nausea or dizziness or even allergic inflammations. Phew.
This is the case with almost all the medication we take. In fact, not just medication but any chemical we interact with in our daily lives – cosmetics, household items, industrial products. Nothing is guaranteed safe. Sure, they are all probably approved by authorities after passing extensive tests, but none of these tests were performed on you, or even anyone like you. Most likely they were performed on animals and perhaps, following that, a small group of humans who shared neither your age group, nor your ethnicity, nor your family history, nor your gender, nor a thousand other things that make you different from everyone else. No wonder then that we all react differently to many drugs.
Wanted: a better model
It’s not even that such a generic way of developing drugs gets them to the market quicker – most take at least 10 years and a LOT of money, not to mention animal lives, to get approved. It takes that long to get access to and observe the animal models and conduct human trials. The whole process is lengthy and inefficient but for the longest time, it was the best available option.
A lot of that is changing now, and along with a relatively small group of scientists in the world, Prajakta Dandekar at the Institute of Chemical Technology, Mumbai, is helping make this happen. “In the last decade using animals has become increasingly difficult because of ethical concerns and the costs involved. We now need tech that can provide equally robust results so that we can reduce the number of animals that go into these investigations.”
Enter, organ-on-chip technology. An organ-on-chip is essentially that – an organ on a chip. It’s a representation of a human organ on a chip, the size of a memory card. “With this technology, it is possible to grow human tissues in 3D orientation. That would increase the likeliness of the tissue with an in-vivo (inside body) situation, so that is the idea,” sums up Dandekar, who heads one of the few labs in India which work on this technology. With this, there is now a model, of a human lung for example, that we can conduct tests on to more accurately estimate how well the body responds to a drug.
In her TED talk about this, Geraldine Hamilton says that this technique is paving the way for a “human-on-chip” where all the organs are connected enough to mimic a living human system. This will allow us to model what the effects of a drug might be to the whole body instead of localised effects. Moreover, these chips can use cells of a specific person, and we can have a Nandita on a chip or an Aashima on a chip and predict if my analgesic will work as well for Aashima as it does for me! The era of personalised medicine is beckoning.