Drug development is long, complex and expensive, with <0.001% of drugs under development actually succeeding in getting market approval. For each approved drug, different patients can respond differently or fail to respond, resulting in exposure to unjustified drugs and delay of the institution of effective treatment. Personalized medicine aims to overcome this challenge, while using an individual’s genetic profile to guide decisions made in regard to treatment of disease.
Inflammatory bowel diseases affect over 5 million individuals worldwide. Ulcerative Colitis, an inflammatory bowel disease, is characterized by chronic inflammation and a relapsing and remitting clinical course that requires lifelong treatment. Current models of inflammatory bowel diseases such as Colitis do not accurately mimic the intestine tissue structure with the induced disease, and consequently have limited applicability in predicting therapeutic response.
There is a need for novel personalized platforms to improve therapeutics choices and patient outcomes.
An advanced approach using organ chips as in vitro systems to model human behavior is emerging to accelerate the productivity of drug development and better predict patients’ response to specific drugs.
CollPlant is developing a 3D bioprinted human intestine chip for drug discovery and high throughput screening of drugs, to be used in personal medicine applications for the treatment of Ulcerative Colitis. The in-vitro gut-on-a-chip will be based on CollPlant’s RhCollagen in combination with other proprietary biomaterials and human cells, designed to emulate the human intestine tissue.
3D bioprinted human intestine chip has the potential to accelerate new drug development, reduce costs, support development of personalized, highly effective treatments for Ulcerative Colitis and significantly reduce or eliminate the need for animal testing.
