[Update 5/18/15: According to a Wyss Institute press release, the Design Museum in London has selected the organs-on-chips as the winner of their 2015 Designs of the Year exhibition’s Product category.]
If you’re in New York City in the next few months, pop into the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and stop by the “This Is For Everyone: Design For The Common Good” exhibit. There—alongside displays dedicated to the “@” symbol, the pin icon from Google Maps and bricks made from living mushroom roots—you’ll find three small silicone blocks mounted on a wall panel.
Earlier this month, MoMA announced its plans to include the chips as part of their exploration of contemporary design in the digital age. In the museum’s eyes, organs-on-chips are more than a way to model disease in a complex, living system—they’re also art. …
Life teems with interactions. Proteins bind. Bonds form between atoms, and break. Enzymes cut. Drugs attach to cell receptors. DNA hybridizes. Those interactions make the processes of life work, and capturing them has led to many medical advances.
Technologies abound for studying molecular-level interactions quantitatively. But most are complex and expensive, requiring dedicated instruments and specific training on how to prep samples and run the experiments.
Wong and his team, including graduate student Mounir Koussa and postdoctoral fellows Ken Halvorsen, PhD (now at the RNA Institute) and Andrew Ward, PhD, have created an alternative method that democratizes the process. Using electrophoresis gels, found in just about any biomedical laboratory, they’ve developed what they call DNA nanoswitches. These switches let researchers make interaction measurements without complex instruments, at a cost of pennies per sample. …
Pick up a piece of IV tubing (should you happen to have one nearby) and run your hand down the length of it. The surface feels pretty smooth, yes?
From the perspective of bacteria and platelets, that same surface is pockmarked with nooks and crannies where they can stick, aggregate and start to form blood clots (in the case of platelets) or hard-to-combat biofilms (in the case of bacteria).
That’s a problem for hospital care. Contaminated central lines (IV lines threaded into deep veins for long periods of time) cause upwards of 41,000 costly and potentially fatal central line-associated bloodstream infections (CLABSIs) in pediatric and adult patients in U.S. hospitals every year. And blood clots can preclude patients, including premature babies, from receiving new lung-protecting treatments because they can’t tolerate anticoagulants.
In the tale Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Goldilocks tries all of the bears’ porridge, chairs and beds, finding that only the little bear’s things were just right. Everything else was a little off for her…too hot or too cold, too hard or too soft and so on.
Similarly, for everything to work as it should in the body, things need to be just right. Blood pressure shouldn’t be too high or too low; organs can’t be too big or too small, etc.
Donald Ingber, MD, PhD, and his lab in Boston Children’s Vascular Biology Program take this “just right” approach when thinking about how organs and tissues are structured. Recently, he and a member of his research staff, Akiko Mammoto, MD, PhD, discovered that by changing the stiffness of the surrounding tissues—not too loose and not too tight— they could keep blood vessels from leaking. Their finding could have real consequences for people with sepsis or other diseases featuring leaky vessels. …
Grab a garden hose. Put your thumb over the end, but not all the way, and turn the water on. What happens? The water coming out of the hose gets squeezed as it tries to push past your thumb, putting a lot of force on the molecules in the water and making a big spray.
Now do the same thing with an artery: Partially block it with a clot and let blood flow through it. In this case, the force you’ve created in the artery could be lethal—creating fertile ground for blood clots that could lead to a stroke or heart attack.