Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center’s Institute for Regenerative Medicine is leading a $24 million federal project to develop new technology to develop and test countermeasures to biological attacks.

The project aims to develop a “body on a chip” that can stand in for human organs in developing bioterror countermeasures. A miniaturized system of human organs could be used to model the body’s response to harmful agents and in turn develop therapies to address those threats. These chips would reduce the need for animal testing, which is expensive, slow and not always applicable to humans.

“Miniature lab-engineered, organ-like hearts, lungs, livers and blood vessels – linked together with a circulating blood substitute – will be used both to predict the effects of chemical and biologic agents and to test the effectiveness of potential treatments,” Dr. Anthony Atala, M.D., director of WFIRM and lead investigator on the project said in a statement.

The contract was awarded by Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center, Pacific on behalf of Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA). The concept of developing a body on a chip will employ micro-tissue engineering and micro-fluidics technologies. The concept follows on the miniaturization trend that has occurred in the electronics industry. But instead of miniaturizing electronics on a chip, researchers aim to miniaturize human organs and the monitoring devices and laboratory processes. Wake Forest’s 3-D printer will be used to print organoids on the chip. Other partners on the project, and the expertise they will contribute, are as follows:

  • Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston – micro- and nanoscale bioengineering devices for controlling cellular behavior.
  • University of Michigan – microscale models of the body and biomolecular devices and technologies for high-throughput drug testing.
  • The U.S. Army Edgewood Chemical Biological Center – chemical warfare agent research, development, engineering, and testing.
  • Morgan State University – laboratory testing of cell cultures to identify the ideal blood surrogate.
  • The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health – toxicity testing and identification.