ABSTRACT
Clinical trials with human patients often end with the discovery that promising, newly developed drugs are toxic. The number of drugs that work without side effects in animals, but show significant toxicity in humans is as high as 45 out of 50. In other words, drugs that are not toxic for animals can have a very different effect in humans. Unless we develop better mimics of the human body that can be used for drug testing, patients will continue to place hope into drugs that do not work. Our group works on the development of multi-organ microphysiological systems that can mimic the human metabolism. Those systems can be used to simulate drug exposure and the drug’s conversion to metabolites. Our current platform contains chambers for the GI tract, liver, bone marrow, and kidney, providing a platform that can be used to test a drug’s first pass metabolism. The platform allows us to make predictions of drug actions for human patients.
The adoption of multi-organ microphysiological systems requires that the systems are inexpensive, easy to use and that they mimic the human metabolism as truthfully as possible. Replicating results obtained with such systems will depend on implementing standards ranging from platform materials, design, and most of all, physiologic liquid-to-cell ratios.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Mandy B. Esch is a CNST project leader in the Nanoscale Imaging and Spectroscopy Group. She received an M.S. in Biology and a Ph.D. in Biotechnology from the Julius Maximilians (Würzburg) University in Germany. During her PhD research she developed paper-microfluidics and microfluidic biosensors for the detection of pathogens that can contaminate drinking water. In 2001, Mandy joined the Cornell Nanoscale Science and Technology Facility as life sciences liaison, where she helped create nanobiotechnology projects. In 2007, she joined the department of Biomedical Engineering at Cornell University as a senior research associate. While there, she developed several patents for multi-organ body-on-a-chip systems. For this work, her team received the 2015 Lush Science Prize. From 2015 to 2016 Mandy spent a year as an assistant professor at Syracuse University at the Department of Biomedical and Chemical Engineering. She taught nanobiotechnology and built a laboratory for tissues-on-chip research. In 2016 Mandy moved to Maryland, where she joined NIST. Her work at NIST will focus on integrating tissue sensors with tissues-on-a-chip devices.
