The human guinea pig may soon be extinct. He (it’s usually a ‘he’) has become endangered through the advances of cell culture science, which increasingly close the gap between in vitro testing (the classic petri dish kind) and experimental trials using live human subjects.
Boston, Massachusetts-based Emulate hopes to deal the final blow in the coming years with its ‘organs-on-chips’ technology.
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The company’s lead product, currently in development, is the “human emulation system,” built around customizable microfluidics chips, an instrument reader, and software that manages both.
Emulate has a lot of scientific potential, many notable partnerships, and it just expanded its Series B funding for a total of $45 million.
But it is early days for the 2014 Harvard spin-out. It remains to be seen whether the company can simplify its system and lower the cost enough to attract mainstream industry and academic users.
In a phone interview, Geraldine Hamilton, president and chief scientific officer at Emulate, declined to comment on pricing but said the technology was both rapidly advancing and scalable. With the software in development, Hamilton said the aim was to build something that was simple enough for the majority of cell biologists to use.
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“The goal is to create a plug and play system, to really enable the translation of the technology into the hands of the end-user,” Hamilton said.
The idea of an “organ-on-a-chip” is new, but not novel. The term refers to any number of microfluidic devices that are designed with a structure similar to human tissues and organs. This landscape is then populated with living cells, creating a full ecosystem for studies ranging from neurotoxicity testing to how stents function in a life-like cardiac artery.
The three-dimensional evolution from single-layer cells is now so well-subscribed, Select Biosciences has started an annual “Organ-on-a-Chip World Congress.”
In a busy field, Hamilton said Emulate has been unique from the beginning, primarily due to the skillset of its team.
“We work by combining engineering and biology together and getting those disciplines to work together on a common problem,” Hamilton said. “Bringing engineering into biology allows us to micro engineer an environment that recreates natural physiology — what the cell experiences in vivo.”
Hamilton said the core physiological ingredient Emulate adds is the presence of mechanical forces. Any cell in the body, whether it’s lung or brain or skin, is affected by physics.
Emulate microchips recreate this with a three-channel design. Two channels contain cells, while the third is engineered with a vacuum seal, enabling it to expand and contract like a heart beating, or a lung inhaling. According to Hamilton, this induces a certain response from the nearby cells, more accurately mimicking in vivo conditions than a static 3D model could.
Emulate’s chips also make the cells feel at home with an extracellular matrix, a tissue-to-tissue interface, biochemicals (such as growth hormones), immune cells and blood components.
Hamilton said each ‘organ-on-a-chip’ is superficially built the same, to fit into the system instrument. However, the internal configurations can be programmed with the company software, allowing for full customization based on the cell microenvironment required.
Emulate’s mission is to create a product, not a service, so the configuration process will need to be intuitive and specific.
In the meantime, the company is working closely with different pharma, academic and philanthropic groups, including Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Covance and the Michael J Fox Foundation. An intriguing partnership has also been struck with microbiome company Seres Therapeutics, which could add another dimension — bacteria — to the cellular picture.
There are many takers for a technology that, in Hamilton’s words, “provides a window into human biology and disease.”
Photo: Emulate
