NIH awards grants for using bioengineered models to improve clinical trial design

Reviewed by Emily Henderson, B.Sc.Sep 30 2020

Clinical Trials on a Chip researchers plan to build and test common and rare disease models to help improve the clinical trial process.

Approximately 85% of late-stage clinical trials of candidate drugs fail because of drug safety problems or ineffectiveness, despite promising preclinical test results. To help improve the design and implementation of clinical trials, the National Institutes of Health has awarded 10 grants to support researchers' efforts in using tiny, bioengineered models of human tissues and organ systems to study diseases and test drugs. One major goal of the funded projects is to develop ways to better predict which patients are most likely to benefit from an investigational therapy prior to initiating clinical trials.

The awards total more than $6.9 million in the first year, and approximately $35.5 million over five years, pending available funds. They are administered through a new program, Clinical Trials on a Chip, which is led by NIH's National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) in conjunction with several other NIH Institutes and Centers, including the National Cancer Institute, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases.

Tissue chips, or organs-on-chips, are 3-D platforms engineered to support living human tissues and cells and mimic complex biological functions of organs and systems. Tissue chips are currently being developed for drug safety and toxicity testing and disease modeling research, including on the International Space Station. Clinical Trials on a Chip is one of several initiatives that are a part of the NCATS-led Tissue Chip for Drug Screening program, which was started in 2012 to address the major gaps in the drug development process

The projects are organized into two phases. In the first phase, the grantees will develop tissue chip models of disease. They also will develop biological indicators from the chips that correlate with clinical condition and enable scientists to determine the progression of a disease and effectiveness of a therapy. In the second phase, the researchers will evaluate the usefulness of the disease models by testing candidate therapies and, in some cases, collaborating with pharmaceutical and biotech companies to compare patient results with that of the corresponding patient chips.

Many of these therapies will be tested in tissue chips in parallel to patients in clinical trials. In one project, for example, scientists plan to develop a tissue chip model of two types of muscular dystrophy, a muscle-wasting disease, to study the effects of a promising drug candidate already being tested in patients. Another team of researchers plans to develop a bone marrow model to determine which patients with treatment-resistant prostate cancer that has spread to the bone might benefit from a new therapy that also is being tested in patients.

The new grantees bring expertise in clinical trial design, disease biology, engineering, pharmacology, computational biology and more. They will study a range of common and rare diseases, such as prostate cancer, pediatric disorders, kidney disease, heart disease, fatty liver disease and a disease that causes premature aging as well as premature birth.

Our hope is to eventually impact the fundamental way we do clinical trials. We want to see if tissue chips can be a useful platform in which to help researchers preempt some potential challenges with trials. The teams have to make sure the models are valid and show that data from tissue chips accurately reflect results in people. If tissue chip data can predict which patient populations might benefit the most from investigational drugs, this information could potentially improve clinical trial success rates."

Danilo Tagle, Ph.D., NCATS associate director for special initiatives

Danilo Tagle oversees the program, along with scientific program manager Passley Hargrove-Grimes, Ph.D

The 2020 awardees are:

Boston Children's Hospital
William Pu, M.D., and Kevin Kit Parker, Ph.D. (Harvard University's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering) Tissue Chips for Precision Treatment of Catecholaminergic Polymorphic Ventricular Tachycardia
Grant number: 1UG3TR003279-01

Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston
Yu-Shrike Zhang, Ph.D.
Clinical Trials on a Premature Vascular Aging-on-a-Chip Model
Grant number: 1UG3TR003274-01

Cedars-Sinai, Los Angeles
Clive Niels Svendsen, Ph.D.
A Microphysiological Multicellular Organ-on-Chip to Inform Clinical Trials in FTD/ALS
Grant number: 1UG3TR003264-01

Columbia University, New York City (two-year award)
Angela M. Christiano, Ph.D.
Clinical Trials in a Dish Using a Personalized Multi-Tissue Platform for Atopic Dermatitis
Grant number: 1UG3AR079297

Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore
Deok-Ho Kim, Ph.D., and David Alan Kass, M.D.
Engineering Clinical Trials on a Chip for Dystrophin-Deficient Muscular Dystrophy
Grant number: 1UG3TR003271-01

Texas A&M University/Texas Engineering Experiment Station, College Station
Arum Han, Ph.D., and Ramkumar Menon, Ph.D. (University of Texas)
Developing Extracellular Vesicle-Based Therapeutics Against Pre-Term Birth Through the Use of Maternal-Fetal Interface on a Chip
Grant number: 1UG3TR003283-01

University of Pittsburgh
D. Lansing Taylor, Ph.D., Jaideep Behari, M.D., Ph.D., and Alejandro Soto-Gutierrez, M.D., Ph.D.
A Vascularized Patient-Derived iPSC Liver Acinus Microphysiological System as an Innovative Precision Medicine Platform for
Optimizing Clinical Trial Design for Nonalcoholic Fatty Liver Disease
Grant number: 1UG3TR003289-01

University of Rochester
Hani A. Awad, Ph.D., James L. McGrath, Ph.D., and Benjamin L. Miller, Ph.D.
A Microphysiological System of Tendon Inflammation and Fibrosis for Drug Screening and Efficacy Testing
Grant number: 1UG3TR003281-01

University of Washington, Seattle
Jonathan Himmelfarb, M.D., and Matthias Kretzler, M.D. (University of Michigan)
Safety and Efficacy of Human Clinical Trials Using Kidney-on-a-Chip Microphysiological Systems
Grant number: 1UG3TR003288-01

University of Wisconsin, Madison
David J. Beebe, Ph.D. and Joshua Michael Lang, M.D.
Mechanisms of Microenvironment Mediated Resistance to Cancer Cell Surface Targeted Therapeutics
Grant number: 1UG3CA260692-01