RICHMOND, Va. -- With a quickly developing world, researchers for decades have been able to improve the quality of human life with drug treatments. But to get those drugs tested requires a long series of tests, government approvals, and certifications. However, researchers with Virginia Tech hope they will soon be able to ease some of those requirements.
Virginia Tech announced Monday the approval of a $1.8 million grant from the National Institutes of Health aimed at developing a new solution to give human-oriented results with synthetic tools.
Testing of new drugs on humans is typically part of a clinical trial that occurs near the end of the drug's path to public use. And as recently as 2022 the FDA committed to exploring alternative methods to replace using lab animals in testing.
Those calls to do away with animal testing are for a number of reasons such as ethical concerns and because of the differences in animal and human biology.
Virginia Tech's Jeff Schultz will be joining the group of academic researchers working to find a solution. Their hypothetical approach would use new technologies to create testing environments that are customized to the study.
Simply but the drugs would be tested on cells rather than humans or creatures.
Put into practice
One area where researchers say they are seeing a upside to the new technology is with physiological barriers. One such as the so called 'blood-brain barrier' that is a network of blood vessels and tissues inside of the brain.
The barrier researchers say allows substances like water and oxygen to enter the brain while keeping out harmful substances that could lead to disease or tumors. "Recreating this intricate environment for drug testing has been challenging, and it is not uncommon for clinical trials to fail when they move from the lab," Virginia Tech explained in a release.
The team will now use a 3-d printing method to create microfluids at previously unattainable resolutions that are reproducible and scalable.
While this project is focused on the blood-brain barrier, the core technology has wide-ranging applications for other organs such as the liver, lungs, and skin.
“We’re building something that more realistically mimics the geometry of the body compared to other microfluidics,” said Schultz. “Harnessing the design freedom of 3D printing allows us to create devices that have the same curvature, size of veins, and functionality of the human body. We can put in valves similar to the heart that are accustomed to pulsating mechanical stresses. This gives us the opportunity to see results that are closer to real life than if the cells were laying flat in a dish, and is done in other conventional microfluidic devices, but has yet to be applied to the blood brain barrier.”
Teams with Georgia Tech and Harvard Medical School are joining Virginia Tech in this research.
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