Microphysiological systems (MPS) may provide a way to better understand and address the main failures of clinical programs: lack of efficacy or unacceptable side effects that are not predicted in animals or simpler cell systems during early preclinical stages. Despite the mostly exploratory nature of current MPS, there is an appetite for the uptake of the technology by pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries to improve on human predictivity, with the long-term goal of eventually replacing animal models wherever possible. Simultaneously, both academic groups and multiple biotech companies are developing increasingly refined MPS models to meet the needs and quality standards required for drug development such as scalability and robustness. Read more

Roth A and MPS-WS Berlin 2019 [Marx U, Vilén L, Ewart L, Griffith LG, Hartung T, Ingber DE, Mendrick DL, Steger-Hartmann T and Tagle DA]. Human microphysiological systems for drug development. Science 2021, 373:1304-1306

Source: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abc3734