Universiteit Leiden

It’s been a while since I’ve featured a story about a technology that could drastically reduce (or even eliminate) animal testing. Researchers in the Netherlands have announced some guts-on-a-chip research that may do just that. From an Aug. 22, 2017 news item on ScienceDaily,

Research conducted at Leiden has established that guts-on-chips respond in the same way to aspirin as real human organs do. This is a sign that these model organs are good predictors of the effect of medical drugs on the human body.

A method to test medical drugs for efficacy and potential side-effects, but then much cheaper and using the fewest possible lab animals: this is likely to be possible in future thanks to organs-on-chips, miniature model organs on microchips. In these model organs, which are equipped with human organ cells and microfluidic channels, researchers and pharmacists can mimic the working of an organ.

An Aug. 17, 2017 University of Leiden (Universiteit Leiden) press release, which originated the news item, provides more detail,

Leiden researchers, their spin-off company Mimetas and pharmaceutical company Roche have now shown that one type of organ chip experiences the same side-effects from the drug aspirin as the same organ in the human body. This is good news, because it is a sign that these miniature model organs are good predictors of the effect of medical drugs in the human body.

Aspirin

The researchers exposed 357 guts-on-chips for a significant period to the substance acetylsalicylic acid, better known as the analgesic aspirin. It has been known for a long time already that this substance can lead to gastrointestinal perforation, a complication that can be fatal if untreated. ‘We saw exactly the same side-effects occur in our guts-on-chips,’ says Professor of Analytical Biosciences Thomas Hankemeier. ‘In our model guts the gut wall also became more permeable after the drug had been administered.’

Effectiveness of candidate drugs

According to Hankemeier, the research shows that organs-on-chips are suited to testing a medical drug for efficacy and side-effects. This is good news for pharmacists, because the model organs make it easier for them to evaluate whether candidate drugs are effective or harmful. Many substances would be excluded from futher research before a drug entered the lab animal phase. This would help reduce the cost of drug production and mean less animal testing.

Diagnosing diseases

Organs-on-chips have taken off in recent years. They will be increasingly important in the near future, not just in drug development but also in the diagnosis of disease. Leiden researchers are at the forefront of this development. Hankemeier and a number of other groups (Erasmus MC, VUmc, RU Groningen) have been awared a 1.5 million ZonMW grant to research the effect of the body’s micro-organisms in the gut on the development of dementia. Organ-on-a-chip technology will play an important role here. Mimetas is the first company in the world to produce and sell organ chips on a large scale.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Membrane-free culture and real-time barrier integrity assessment of perfused intestinal epithelium tubes by Sebastiaan J. Trietsch, Elena Naumovska, Dorota Kurek, Meily C. Setyawati, Marianne K. Vormann, Karlijn J. Wilschut, Henriëtte L. Lanz, Arnaud Nicolas, Chee Ping Ng, Jos Joore, Stefan Kustermann, Adrian Roth, Thomas Hankemeier, Annie Moisan, & Paul Vulto. Nature Communications 8, Article number: 262 (2017) doi:10.1038/s41467-017-00259-3 Published online: 15 August 2017

This paper is open access.

You can find Mimetas here.

Where taxonomy and biology are concerned, my knowledge begins and end with Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish scientist who ushered in modern taxonomy. It was with some surprise that I find out artists also helped develop the field. From a June 21, 2016 news item on ScienceDaily,

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries artists were fascinated by how the animal kingdom was classified. They were in some instances ahead of natural historians.

This is one of the findings of art historian Marrigje Rikken. She will defend her PhD on 23 June [2016] on animal images in visual art. In recent years she has studied how images of animals between 1550 and 1630 became an art genre in themselves. ‘The close relationship between science and art at that time was remarkable,’ Rikken comments. ‘Artists tried to bring some order to the animal kingdom, just as biologists did.’

A June 21, 2016 Universiteit Leiden (Leiden University, Netherlands) press release, which originated the news item, expands on the theme,

In some cases the artists were ahead of their times. They became interested in insects, for example, before they attracted the attention of natural historians. It was artist Joris Hoefnagel who in 1575 made the first miniatures featuring beetles, butterflies and dragonflies, indicating how they were related to one another. In his four albums Hoefnagel divided the animal species according to the elements of fire, water, air and earth, but within these classifications he grouped animals on the basis of shared characteristics.

Beetles, butterflies, and dragonflies by Joris Hoefnagel. Courtesy: Universiteit Leiden

The press release goes on,

Other illustrators, print-makers and painters tried to bring some cohesion to the animal kingdom. Some of them used an alphabetical system but artist Marcus Gheeraerts published a print as early as 1583 [visible below, Ed.] in which grouped even-toed ungulates together. The giraffe and sheep – both visible on Gheeraerts’ print – belong to this species of animals. This doesn’t apply to all Gheeraerts’ animals. The mythical unicorn, which was featured by Gheeraerts, no longer appears in contemporary biology books.

Wealthy courtiers

According to Rikken, the so-called menageries played an important role historically in how animals were represented. These forerunners of today’s zoos were popular in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries particularly among wealthy rulers and courtiers. Unfamiliar exotic animals regularly arrived that were immediately committed to paper by artists. Rikken: ‘The toucan, for example, was immortalised in 1615 by Jan Brueghel the Elder, court painter in Brussels.’ [See the main image, Ed.].’

In the flesh

Rikken also discovered that the number of animals featured in a work gradually increased. ‘Artists from the 1570s generally included one or just a few animals per work. With the arrival of print series a decade later, each illustration tended to include more and more animals. This trend reached its peak in the lavish paintings produced around 1600.’ These paintings are also much more varied than the drawings and prints. Illustrators and print-makers often blindly copied one another’s motifs, even showing the animals in an identical pose. Artists had no hesitation in including the same animal in different positions. Rikken: ‘This allowed them to show that they had observed the animal in the flesh.’

Even-toed ungulates by Marcus Gheeraerts. Courtesy: Leiden Universiteit

Yet more proof or, at least, a very strong suggestion that art and science are tightly linked.

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Tag Archives: Universiteit Leiden

Predicting drug side effects with guts-on-a-chip

Artists classified the animal kingdom?