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organ-on-a-chip

heart chip BarthIt was the variability that intrigued pediatric cardiologist William Pu, MD, about his patient with heart failure. The boy suffered from a rare genetic mitochondrial disorder called Barth syndrome. While he ultimately needed a heart transplant, his heart function seemed to vary day-to-day, consistent with reports in the medical literature.

“Often patients present in infancy with severe heart failure, then in childhood it gets much better, and in the teen years, much worse,” says Pu, of the Cardiology Research Center at Boston Children’s Hospital. “This reversibility suggests that this is a disease we should really be able to fix.”

Though it needs much more testing, a potential fix may now be in sight for Barth syndrome, which has no specific treatment and also causes skeletal muscle weakness and low white-blood-cell counts. It’s taken the work of multiple labs collaborating across institutional lines. Full story »

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Combining microfabrication techniques from the computer industry with modern tissue engineering, a team at Children’s Hospital Boston and Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering has created a device that mimics the function of a human lung. This living “lung-on-a-chip,” which incorporates human lung and blood-vessel cells, reproduces the all-important interface between the lung’s tiny air sacs and the bloodstream. Breathing is simulated with a vacuum pump.

The wafer-sized device mimics the human lung’s response to infectious agents, airborne particles and toxins in a way that’s truer to real life than standard cell testing in a lab dish. Full story »

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