Approximately 30 percent of promising medications have failed in human clinical trials because they are found to be toxic despite promising pre-clinical studies in animal models. About 60 percent of candidate drugs fail due to lack of efficacy.
To address this problem, NCATS, through its Tissue Chip for Drug Screening program, along with other NIH Institutes and Centers, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), leads the development of 3-D platforms engineered to support living human tissues and cells, called tissue chips or organs-on-chips.
Tissue chip devices are designed as accurate models of the structure and function of human organs, such as the lung, liver and heart. Once developed and integrated, researchers can use these models to predict whether a candidate drug, vaccine or biologic agent is safe or toxic in humans in a faster and more effective way than current methods.
The ultimate goal of the program is to accelerate the translation of basic discoveries into the clinic. By creating an integrated human body-on-a-chip, researchers can test the varied potential effects of a substance like a drug across the entire body before any testing in humans.
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https://ncats.nih.gov/tissuechip/about
