Unlocking the data content of Organ-on-Chips
About Project UNLOOC
UNLOOC aims to develop groundbreaking Organ-on-Chips (OOC) technologies to mitigate the challenges posed by the use of animals in drug development and testing. Direct use of human cells is a real game-changer, bridging the gender gap and allowing personalized medicine.
The challenge
Before drugs can proceed to clinical trials on human subjects, animal models have traditionally been used to validate the effectiveness, toxicity, and pharmacokinetics of the drug. However, use of animal models comes with many potential challenges, such as lower predictability to humans, high failure rates in clinical trials, excessive costs in drug development, and risk of death caused by unwanted side effects in approved drugs.
The project
UNLOOC is a 3-year project tackling the challenge inherent in animal testing of drugs. It brings together 51 organisations from 10 European countries. The consortium aims to demonstrate through its five novel use cases how the groundbreaking methods using Organ-on-a-Chip (OOC) technology enable the development of more effective treatments, leaving animal subjects out of the equation. The OOC technology to be developed in the UNLOOC project will not only enable controlled drug testing, but also the modelling of disease pathophysiology. The project’s total budget of €68 million consists of €14 million in funding from the Chips Joint Undertaking, €3 million from the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI), €18 million from national agencies, and €33 million from partners’ own contribution.
The role of LioniX International
To help this noble cause, LioniX will work on developing ‘Skin-on-Chip’. For the growth and characterization of skin in a microfluidic chip, LioniX International introduces a novel sensing modality: depth imaging using Optical Coherence Tomography, OCT. Using our proprietary Integrated Photonic Circuits, depth imaging with micrometer resolution becomes the new reality with this optical analogue to ultrasound imaging.
FURTHER INFORMATION:
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