Liver–Heart on chip models for drug safety

Abstract

Current pre-clinical models to evaluate drug safety during the drug development process (DDP) mainly rely on traditional two-dimensional cell cultures, considered too simplistic and often ineffective, or animal experimentations, which are costly, time-consuming, and not truly representative of human responses. Their clinical translation thus remains limited, eventually causing attrition and leading to high rates of failure during clinical trials. These drawbacks can be overcome by the recently developed Organs-on-Chip (OoC) technology. OoC are sophisticated in vitro systems capable of recapitulating pivotal architecture and functionalities of human organs. OoC are receiving increasing attention from the stakeholders of the DDP, particularly concerning drug screening and safety applications. When a drug is administered in the human body, it is metabolized by the liver and the resulting compound may cause unpredicted toxicity on off-target organs such as the heart. In this sense, several liver and heart models have been widely adopted to assess the toxicity of new or recalled drugs. Recent advances in OoC technology are making available platforms encompassing multiple organs fluidically connected to efficiently assess and predict the systemic effects of compounds. Such Multi-Organs-on-Chip (MOoC) platforms represent a disruptive solution to study drug-related effects, which results particularly useful to predict liver metabolism on off-target organs to ultimately improve drug safety testing in the pre-clinical phases of the DDP. In this review, we focus on recently developed liver and heart on chip systems for drug toxicity testing. In addition, MOoC platforms encompassing connected liver and heart tissues have been further reviewed and discussed.