Dr. James Hickman envisions a future when doctors can use a cancer patient’s own cells to find out which chemotherapy drug is most effective and when animals are no longer needed for researching new drugs or testing cosmetics.
The UCF professor sees glimpses of it in a translucent plastic block that fits in the palm of his hand. And through the company he founded recently at UCF Business Incubation Program at Central Florida Research Park, he hopes to bring that future closer.
The technology is called Body-on-a-Chip or Human-on-a-Chip, and it’s a rapidly growing field of research.
The idea is to re-create the environment that’s inside the human body in a container and study the effects of various drugs and compounds on human cells before starting a clinical trial.
“The technology is still in the academic and startup arena, but it’s gaining a lot of investor attention,” said Dr. Siobhan Malany, director of translational biology at Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute in Lake Nona. She’s the founder of spin-off company micro-gRx, which uses lab-on-a-chip — a variation of body-on-a-chip technology — to study diseases in space. “It’s an exciting time for it.”
Hickman founded Hesperos less than two years ago with a longtime research colleague and one of the pioneers of the field, Dr. Michael Schuler of Cornell University.
What Hesperos is developing contains sheets of beating heart cells, rows of muscle cells and groups of liver cells and nerve cells, which sit in separate chambers in a small, clear block called a chip and are connected by narrow tunnels filled with a specially formulated medium.
This enables researchers to study the effects of a drug on not one organ, but among several, a feature that sets Hesperos’ product apart from what other labs and startups are developing, Hickman said. So far, the 12-employee company has successfully tested six organs on a chip and hopes to increase it to 10 organs.
The Body-on-a-Chip technology is gaining attention from the industry and investors and is now on the radar for regulators who set the rules for the drug testing process. That’s partly because it could potentially provide a better alternative to animal research, which is ethically controversial and a less than perfect source of testing drugs for humans.
It can also help drug companies develop drugs faster and cheaper.
“One of the big challenges in pharmaceutical development right now is that it’s so expensive to do all the testing,” said Nate Post, Hesperos’ operations manager. With the Body-on-a-Chip technology “you’re able to test 30, whereas before you had the budget to test one or two. So by doing that, you can find better treatments faster for less money.”
The technology is already augmenting animal research, Hickman said.
Now scientists are focusing on overcoming the remaining challenges. For one, Most of the chips today are made in labs, so researchers still have to figure out how to transfer the technology from a lab-scale to industrial large-scale production, say authors of a 2017 paper in the journal WIREs Systems Biology and Medicine.
Researchers also still have to find evidence that the results they get from testing drugs in a chip outside the body is an accurate predictor of what the drug will do inside the body.
Many academics and startups like Hesperos are now focusing their efforts on further proving the reliability of the technology by conducting studies to replicate the results of existing clinical trials.
Last year, Hesperos published the results of a three-year study funded by cosmetics company L’Oreal, showing that the body-on-the-chip accurately predicted the toxicity of five drugs with known side effects. The study also showed for the first time a four-organ system mimicking human response to the drugs in at least 14 days. The ability to study drug’s effect over a long period of time will show researchers whether drugs have acute and chronic side effects.
In 2015, Hesperos shared a $380,000 international award from cosmetic company Lush for developing technology that supports animal-free testing.
Now “pharma is saying this actually may work,” said Hickman, who co-founded UCF NanoScience Technology Center about a decade ago at the Central Florida Research Park.
Hesperos has funding from pharmaceutical company Roche to conduct several studies.
The company currently offers custom-designed systems for clients and is planning to offer its technology to companies that want to test the toxicity of their product on human cells.
Late last year, Hesperos got a major boost from the National Institutes of Health with a $2 million grant to scale-up and commercialize the technology.
But Hickman isn’t looking for major capital investment funding, at least not yet.
“If we get investors, it will hamper the research because they want you to make money … and we just don’t want to make a shell of a thing,” said Hickman.
nmiller@orlandosentinel.com, 407-420-5158, @naseemmiller
An earlier version of this story misstated Dr. James Hickman’s role in Hesperos; he’s the founder of the company. Also, the company received only a share of $380,000 from Lush cosmetic company and it received $2 million from the National Institutes of Health.
