Jeffrey Bland breaks down a JAMA study on body-on-a-chip technology, where human organoids from different tissues like liver, heart, and lung are linked together. The integrated system shows different drug responses than isolated tissues, and the 3D structure reveals cross-talk and system-level effects that 2D cultures miss.
You know, occasionally you pick up something in the literature and you just go oh my word. And it just has an impact on you immediately as being the next age. And such was the way that this little JAMA article hit me entitled Body on a Chip reveals multi tissue interactions during drug exposure. Now what's this all about? Well, it turns out that you can generate these organoids of different organs, take cells of those organs and you can grow them in culture and they will three dimensionally grow to be like mini organs. I know this sounds sci fi, but that that is being done. Now what happens if you take those mini organs that are organoids of those organs of a human body and you connect them together into a system so that you get kind of a body on a chip. So you've got. In this particular example, the illustration shows a liver organoid connected with a cardiac organoid connected to a lung organoid. Now does this sound like systems biology to you? Then they introduced into the system different substances and see if the substances are manipulated, metabolized in different ways when those three organoids are connected versus when they would put that substance into one and only one organoid at a time. In other words, is there cross talk, cross communication among these different organs that changes the physiology as a system versus what you would expect if you're doing just one tissue evaluation at a time, which is by the way, historically a lot of research is done one tissue, one cell type at a time. And it may not be surprising to you to learn, lo and behold, when you have these things connected together, Body on a Chip, you get a much different effect than if you examine each one of those organoids and the influence it has on individually. So this is a way now that individuals are starting at a basic science level to model systems biology at the physiological level and the crosstalk and intercommunication among different cell types, tissue types and organ types. And by the way, it's very interesting that if you grow these tissues on two dimensions, like on a plate, so you have those cells and you grow them on a plate, so there's just two dimensions, you get an entirely different effect than if they're grown in three dimensions and they become an organoid, a little miniature organ in three dimensions has a different function than if they're just grown as a cell type laying on a plate. Meaning there's structure and function at every level that's associated with how things interact and maintain whole body function. Exciting next chapter in our understanding of interaction convergence and emergent structure and function.
