Observing human biology

Every hour, the human body runs experiments no instrument can fully record. Lungs stretch and recoil some twenty thousand times a day. A fresh film of tears spreads across the eye with every blink. In the placenta, a mother's blood flows past her child's, separated by a barrier only a few cells thick. Each of these exchanges carries information about how we stay healthy and how we become ill, yet almost none of it can be observed directly in a living person. For a century, medicine has filled that gap with laboratory animals and learned a great deal from them. It has also learned, often too late, that a mouse is not a human.

Living portraits of human biology

Anatomists once drew the human body from dissection, and microscopists from thin slices of fixed tissue. Every one of those portraits showed a body that had stopped working. We make portraits of human biology that are alive. In our laboratory at Penn, living human cells grow inside miniature engineered devices, where channels, membranes, and mechanical forces coax them into tissues that behave like their counterparts in the body.

Our lung chips breathe. Our eye chips blink. Our placenta chips carry nutrients from mother to fetus. Our bone marrow chip makes blood and mounts an immune defense, and our tumor chips resist the CAR T cells sent to destroy them. One of our systems has flown aboard the International Space Station. More and more, we build these tissues the way nature does, borrowing the rules of embryonic development and letting cells organize themselves.

From models to human data

A model that looks like an organ is only a beginning. We treat each chip as an instrument, a biological computer that takes precisely controlled inputs and returns detailed, quantitative human data. Paired with multi-omics, robotics and machine learning, these small worlds can be built reproducibly and at scale. They can then supply the causal, human-relevant data that computational models of our physiology will need.

Our aim is a science of the human body that we can observe, measure, and eventually simulate, so that we can predict how a drug, a disease, or an exposure will affect a patient before anyone is put at risk.