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Platform Development: Drug Discovery with Human Stem Cell Models
Platform Development
Drug Discovery with Human Stem Cells
Many treatments for diseases that are developed in mice do not translate into human patients for the simple reason that mice are not humans. Additionally, humans represent a diverse and heterogenous population that simply can not be mimicked in genetically-homogenous mouse strains. Furthermore, some human diseases simply do not have any animal models that represent the human condition. In contrast, human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSC) can be induced from skin, blood, and urine samples of real human patients. These stem cells are pluripotent and can be then differentiated into cells that represent various organs, such as the heart. We propose to develop a custom – but simple – chip design that prioritizes commonly-used and commercially-available lab consumables to enable studying multi-cell type and high-throughput analysis at a fraction of the cost of existing systems. Our ultimate goal is to represent all major organs to create a patient-specific human-on-a-chip that is cost-effective, accessible, and high-throughput in order to expedite drug discoveries.







