Janssen uses Emulate's organs-on-chips to improve candidate design and selection

Johnson & Johnson company Janssen Biotech is to deploy Emulate’s organs-on-chips platform to better predict the potential human response of drug candidates under a recently formed research collaboration.

The collaboration, facilitated by the Johnson & Johnson Innovation Center in Boston, utilises Emulate’s organs-on-chips, models human response in an engineered living microenvironment, to advance the clinical goals for three Janssen R&D programmes at the stages of drug candidate design and selection. 

The public disclosure of this collaboration coincides with the achievement by Emulate and Janssen scientists of the first functional demonstration of Emulate’s thrombosis-on-chip platform.  Using the new thrombosis-on-chip, the Emulate and Janssen research teams are evaluating the potential for drug candidates to cause thrombosis, a potential side-effect of certain drug classes such as immuno-therapeutics and oncology drugs. 

The thrombosis-on-chip is an example of the application of the range of different organs-on-chips within Emulate’s platform for providing more predictive data on potential human response to drugs that will enable the design and selection of drug candidates that have a higher potential of success in human clinical trials.

In the collaboration’s R&D programme, the thrombosis-on-chip emulated the conditions and various physiologic parameters involved in clot formation in the human body and provided a mechanistic understanding of the factors implicated in thrombosis. The researchers demonstrated robust functionality of the thrombosis-on-chip, including the following:

• Creating a microenvironment to emulate the physiological function of endothelium-platelet interactions, flow of blood, and related mechanical forces involved in platelet aggregation and clot formation;

• Engineering a microfluidic-based system and integrated analytical methods that embodied an in vitro approach to assess the dynamic functions of platelet interactions with living endothelial cells;

• Demonstrating molecular and cellular level resolution to evaluate platelet activation and aggregation and interaction of endothelial dysfunction and blood-derived factors in causing thrombosis or bleeding;

• Analysing platelet-endothelial interactions under pathophysiological conditions relevant for thrombosis research.

The Emulate and Janssen teams, in collaboration with researchers at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, plan to publish comprehensive data related to the thrombosis-on-chip research in a peer-reviewed journal. 

Under the terms of the collaboration agreement with Janssen, Emulate will provide its organs-on-chips technology to advance the clinical goals for three research programmes: the use of the lung-on-chip and thrombosis-on-chip to evaluate pulmonary thrombosis; use of the liver-on-chip to better predict liver toxicity, a major cause of drug failures in the clinic; and a third undisclosed research programme. Emulate will obtain rights to any discoveries related to the organs-on-chips platform that result from the research collaboration. Janssen has the option to extend the collaboration beyond the initial three programmes, to include additional organs, disease models or drug programmes. 

Emulate is commercialising the organs-on-chips technology that is based on pioneering work conducted by Donald Ingber, M.D., Ph.D. and his team at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University.  Emulate was launched from the Wyss Institute’s technology translation programme in July 2014, providing Emulate with a worldwide license to a robust and broad intellectual property portfolio from Harvard University for the organs-on-chips technology.