In their work, several micro organs were connected in a circuit via tiny microchannels that simulate blood vessels. Under the name "Interrogator", the researchers have developed a robotic device able to automatically cultivate of up to 10 different human organ chips and to mimic the natural blood flow between the organs like in the human body. With the device, they have combined various 3-organ chip configurations with each other and have simulated the oral intake of drugs. By computer scaling the results, pharmacokinetic parameters could be quantitatively predicted, which have been measured in clinical studies.

In a third article, the Ingber team reports on a new human bone marrow chip that more accurately recapitulates a drug- and radiation-induced tissue reaction. With their new in vitro model, they succeeded in identifying a previously unknown abnormality in the bone marrow of patients suffering from a rare genetic disorder to discover.

The researchers presented their work in Nature Biomedical Engineering:
a) Herland, A., Maoz, B.M., Das, D. et al. Quantitative prediction of human pharmacokinetic responses to drugs via fluidically coupled vascularized organ chips. Nat Biomed Eng (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41551-019-0498-9
b) Novak, R., Ingram, M., Marquez, S. et al. Robotic fluidic coupling and interrogation of multiple vascularized organ chips. Nat Biomed Eng (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41551-019-0497-x
c) Chou, D.B., Frismantas, V., Milton, Y. et al. On-chip recapitulation of clinical bone marrow toxicities and patient-specific pathophysiology. Nat Biomed Eng (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41551-019-0495-z

Source:
https://wyss.harvard.edu/news/human-body-on-chip-platform-enables-in-vitro-prediction-of-drug-behaviors-in-humans/
https://wyss.harvard.edu/news/successfully-predicting-bone-marrow-failure-caused-by-drugs-radiation-and-disease/