PDD0001 - Organs-on-Chips in Drug Discovery

Course Description

An organ-on-a-chip (OOC) is a multi-channel 3-D microfluidic cell culture chip that simulates the activities, mechanics and physiological response of entire organs and organ systems, a type of artificial organ with multiple applications in drug discovery and development. Professor John Wikswo is the A. B. Learned Professor of Living Physics, a Gordon A. Cain University Professor, in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and Molecular Physiology and Biophysics, and the Director of the Vanderbilt Institute for Integrative Biosystems Research and Education (VIIBRE). For the past 40 years, John Wikswo has worked on measurements and modeling in bioengineering and electrophysiology, initially at the scale of humans and dogs, then with rodents, and more recently at the level of nanoliter bioreactors and individual cells. John Wikswo's research effort focuses on systems biology, primarily from the perspective of organs-on-a-chip and the optimization of automated systems for combined experimental control and inference of quantitative metabolic and signaling models to help us better span the breadth of spatiotemporal scales of systems biology, toxicology, and pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics. The goal of this course is to explore the importance of organs-on-chips and a systems biology perspective in drug discovery and development. The learning objectives for this course are utilizing the online platform to get the most out of the course, understanding the concept of multidimensional phase space, defining organs-on-chips in the context of systems biology, describing the history and complexity of biology and how this relates to drug discovery and development, and finally predicting how organs-on-chips will impact drug discovery in the future.