While human beings are known to be skilled across various different areas, our skill in regards to solving a problem tops them all. This is because when you know how to navigate through an undesirable situation rather effortlessly, you end up opening a lot of new avenues for yourself, and that can play a big role in your growth over time. Nevertheless, the whole thing, as we know, sounds way simpler than it is in reality. We’ll even see the stated fact proving itself time and time again throughout our journey, thus forcing us to enlist some help. Now, the help did arrive, and it arrived in many disguises, but if we are being honest, none of the disguises were ever on technology’s level. Technology gets to be such an anomaly for multiple reasons. We start with the creation’s unprecedented skill-set. However, a more significant element here is the creation’s reach. Right from the get-go, technology has managed to impact each and every area on our spectrum, including a highly-critical healthcare sector. In fact, the famous medtech concept was a success so big that it revamped our entire outlook towards the sphere, and after looking at one recent development, we can only expect this transition to get bigger and better.
The researching team at Columbia University School of Engineering and Applied Science has successfully developed an organ-on-a-chip system, which is designed to help us in studying the effects of drugs or interventions on multiple organs simultaneously. According to certain reports, the system contains heart, bone, liver, and skin tissue in independent niches. These niches are understood to be linked with simulated vascular flows. Notably enough, it also has immune cells circulating in the simulated vasculature so to replicate the original function as closely as possible. Another fact worth a mention goes back to the system’s engineered tissues that are constructed using pluripotent stem cells derived from a blood sample. This element, in particular, has the potential to segway the world into a future where personalized medicine is nothing short of mainstream.
“Providing communication between tissues while preserving their individual phenotypes has been a major challenge,” said Kacey Ronaldson-Bouchard, a researcher involved in the study. “Because we focus on using patient-derived tissue models we must individually mature each tissue so that it functions in a way that mimics responses you would see in the patient, and we don’t want to sacrifice this advanced functionality when connecting multiple tissues.”
Bearing the size of a microscopic slide, the new chip is one of the first few devices to bring multiple organs together within an artificial setting.
