Researchers have developed two biochips—a DataChip and a MetaChip—which can show the potential toxicity of chemicals and pharmaceuticals on various human organs, as well as whether the compound will be metabolized and become toxic.

The chip was developed in response to one of the biggest problems facing the pharmaceutical industry—the loss of compounds due to toxicity—according to the Howard P. Isermann ’42 Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering Jonathon Dordick. He explained that many times companies “invest huge amounts of money in a project, only to find that the toxicity is looked at too late in the process.”

By the time that a product gets to the stage in which it is tested on animals, there has already been a huge input of money and time to the research, and many times, the testing stage reveals that the compound is potentially dangerous for use on humans. Not only is the slow and expensive process a problem, but many times the results can be ineffective since animals do not always respond to compounds in the same way as the human body.

The team began their research in 2003, and was funded by the National Institute of Health and the New York State Foundation for Science, Technology, and Innovation. The biochips were “developed to deal with the two components of testing the toxicity of a product: the effect on different cells in our bodies and how toxicity is altered when the compound is metabolized in our bodies,” according to Dordick.

Dordick views the chip as a more accurate and efficient way to test for toxicity of products earlier in the process, meaning that less money would be put into the project as well as less time. “It would allow that information on toxicity which typically doesn’t come until later in the discovery process to be found out earlier,” Dordick said.

In the international market, this product could be especially useful in light of the European ban on animal testing. The MetaChip mimics the metabolic reactions of the human liver, allowing researchers to test how a certain compound will be processed by the human body more effectively and earlier on in the development process. Theoretically, scientists could someday be able to determine how toxic a product may be to a different people with a personalized chip. The DataChip will be more closely like other organs in the human body and would be able to give an extremely fast test of the potential toxicity of products on different types of human cells.

Dordick doesn’t foresee completely eliminating animal testing, but says that animal studies could be better focused with this technology, as well as more useful.

Dordick was joined on this project with Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of California at Berkeley Douglas S. Clark, Moo-Yeal Lee and Michael G. Hogg of Solidus Biosciences, Sumitra M. Sukumaran of RPI, and R. Anand Kumar of Berkeley.

“The technology is an ‘in vitro’ approach to testing for toxicity,” said Dordick. “By developing a better drug discovery process, we can create better drugs.”