A team of university scientists may have unlocked a transformative breakthrough for clinical trials.
What’s happening:
- Scientists at Northwestern University have developed a new technology that could be a breakthrough in simulating how new drugs will affect the human body
- The device, which is called Lattice, is smaller than a shoebox and is a microfluidic device that is compromised of pumps and wells controlled by a computer
How it works:
- The Lattice device is connected directly to a computer which controls how much simulated blood flows into each well and when it happens
- There are eight wells in the device and each can be filled with a different organ tissue, disease or medication
- This enables scientists to start simulating the response of a medication by testing multiple different scenarios to better understand what precisely is happening when a particular medication is dosed
Why it matters:
- Currently there is nothing available for clinical trials in between animal testing and human clinical trials
- Lattice could be a critical new piece of technology to help better understand clinical trial outcomes much sooner than is currently possible
Going deeper:
- Another potential breakthrough Lattice offers is being able to store cultures for much longer periods of time, which unlocks new areas of research opportunity
- Traditional in vitro testing only is able to keep cultures alive for a few days within a dish, whereas Lattice can allow tissues to survive for nearly a month by pumping simulated blood into them consistently
