Organ-on-chip tech offers Hep B hope

Scientists at Imperial College London have become the first in the world to test how pathogens interact with artificial human organs.

The team used an artificial liver ­­- originally developed at MIT, the University of Oxford, and biotechnology company CN Bio Innovations - and tested its response to hepatitis B virus infection.

Dr Marcus Dorner, lead author from Imperial’s School of Public Health, said: “This is the first time that organ-on-a-chip technology has been used to test viral infections. Our work represents the next frontier in the use of this technology. We hope it will ultimately drive down the cost and time associated with clinical trials, which will benefit patients in the long run.”

Artificial human organs, or organ-on-chip technologies, simulate a whole organ’s cell make up and physiology. They act as alternatives to animal models in drug safety testing, but until now they have not been used to test how infectious diseases interact with the organs.

Hepatitis B virus – which is highly infectious and causes liver cancer and cirrhosis – is currently incurable, and affects over 257 million people worldwide. Development of a cure has been slow because there is no model system in which to test potential therapies. However, the Imperial team showed that the liver-on-a-chip technology could be infected with hepatitis B virus at physiological levels and had similar biological responses to the virus as a real human liver, including immune cell activation and other markers of infection. In particular, this platform uncovered the virus’s intricate means of evading inbuilt immune responses - a finding which could be exploited for future drug development.

Other organs-on-chips currently in use include the heart, kidneys, and lungs. The authors say using these artificial organs for human pathogens could help researchers to better understand the mechanisms of infectious disease, and to observe how the virus and cells in the organ interact. Dr Dorner said: “Once we begin testing viruses and bacteria on other artificial organs, the next steps could be to test drug interaction with the pathogens within the organ-on-chip environment.”

The work is published in Nature.