Pharmacokinetics-on-a-chip

How can we predict drug properties, without animal experiments, and with as simple equipment as possible? Instead of using animals to test drugs, the team uses laboratory-grown organs (“organoids”). Organoid development starts with e.g. stem cells, which are stimulated to develop into materials that resemble specific organs, for example liver (the body´s key site for drug metabolism). A key advantage of organoids is one can expose them to drugs, e.g. novel therapeutics, and study their properties (e.g. how fast they are broken down in the body = pharmacokinetics), without animal experiments. In addition, since an organoid can be grown from the cells of a single patient, they can be tools for personalized medicine. We set out to develop a system that can study how drugs are broken down (metabolized) in liver organoids, as simple as possible. The system essentially consists of an organoid chamber (part 1), where drugs can be added. The liver organoid will then metabolize the drugs, and degradation products (metabolites) are then monitored using a simple portable device (part 2), based on liquid chromatography (separates compounds so they can be measured accurately). To do such a complex task with a portable device, we must selectively extract the drugs and metabolites from the chamber, so proteins from the organoid chamber don´t interfere with the measurements. The first step is to design a chamber that can transfer only drugs and metabolites from part 1 to part 2. Our initial results show that our approach can indeed perform this task, i.e. study drug metabolism without animal experiments. The system needs to undergo a process of designing parts that can be mass produced in a robust manner, so other users can apply this approach in their own laboratories. Researchers at the University of Oslo are collaborating with SINTEF Digital for designing a chip device that we call “pharmacokinetics-on-a-chip”.