Metabolic profiling platform for human blood vessels on a chip
In METABOCHIP, the consortium partners want to bring personalised medicine one step closer to reality. They will develop analytical and organ-on-a-chip technologies which can be used to develop therapies for treatment or prevention of vascular diseases by measuring metabolic processes induced by patient blood in blood vessels on a chip. The project involves a multidisciplinary, public-private consortium between Leiden University and Mimetas that brings together two partners with an excellent reputation in organ-on-a-chip models, metabolomics and drug screening.
The current health care is under pressure as the hope for developing medicines that are more effective based on the “one-size-fits-all” theorem is fading away; the current status is that 90% of the medicines are only effective in 30-40% of the patients in late stages of the disease, and this number is worse for chronic conditions. The unmet biomedical need for treating multifactorial chronic diseases can most likely be addressed by a shift towards designing treatments from a systems view integrating these different levels.
The innovative organ-on-a-chip platform developed at MIMETAS and optimised in METABOCHIP allows to perfuse patient’s plasma through blood vessels. The innovative combination of organ-on-a-chip and metabolomics will allow to predict the pathways effected by patient’s blood and predict which interventions will be effective.
They envision that the developed platform will be ultimately used in the clinic for diagnostic purposes. Next, this platform (vessels-on-chip combined with metabolomics) can become a platform to screen for possible compounds to treat sepsis and allow to discover and develop drugs. They will make the technology available via MIMETAS for the organ-on-chip model and for metabolomics via a spin-off or a strategic partner.
