Chips with Everything

In recent years there has been a big rise in the use of immunotherapy for treating cancer – drugs that enable the immune system to recognise and destroy tumours. However, it can be difficult to test these treatments in the lab to make sure they’re safe. Common laboratory animals like mice and rats don’t have the same immune systems as human do, so they may not respond in the same way. And cells grown in plastic dishes don’t have an immune system at all. To solve this problem, researchers have created ‘organs-on-a-chip’ made from a mixture of healthy and immune cells growing on a tiny silicon platform, like the cells seen in this image. Their lung-on-a-chip and bowel-on-a-chip respond to immunotherapy in the same ways that real human organs do, revealing potential side effects from these treatments at an early stage and reducing the risk of safety problems in clinical trials.

Written by Kat Arney

Kat Arney

Writer

Dr Kat Arney is an award-winning science writer, broadcaster and public speaker, and is the founder and Creative Director of First Create The Media.

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• Image by S Jordan Kerns and Chaitra Belgur, and colleagues
• Emulate Inc, Boston, MA, USA and Roche Pharma Research & Early Development, Roche Innovation Center Basel, Basel, Switzerland
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in eLife, August 2021