On February 26, Donald E. Ingber, the award recipient of the 2013 SOT Leading Edge in Basic Science Award, was presented with the NC3Rs Prize from the UK's National Centre for the Replacement, Refinement and Reduction of Animals in Research for his innovative Lung-on-a-Chip research. According to NC3Rs Chief Executive Director Vicky Robinson,"This disruptive technology may be the beginning of a revolution of the systems we use to model human disease and test drugs in the future, with great potential to reduce the need for animals."
Dr. Ingber is the founding director of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, Harvard University; the Judah Folkman Professor of Vascular Biology at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital; and Professor of Bioengineering at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.He is a founder of the emerging field of biologically inspired engineering, and at the Wyss Institute oversees a multifaceted effort to identify the mechanisms that living organisms use to self-assemble and to apply these design principles to develop advanced materials and devices. He also leads the Biomimetic Microsystems platform in which microfabrication techniques from the computer industry are used to build functional circuits with living cells as components. His most recent innovation is a technology for building tiny, complex, three-dimensional models of living human organs. These “organs on chips,” which mimic complicated human functions, are designed to replace traditional animal-based methods for testing of drugs and toxins.
The Lung-on-a-Chip offers a new in vitro approach to drug screening by mimicking the complicated mechanical and biochemical behaviors of a human lung. It is a small device the size of an emory stick composed of a clear, flexibile polymer that contains hollow channels fabricated using computer microchip manufacturing techniques. Dr. Ingber and his team used the lung-on-a-chip to mimic a complex human disease, pulmonary edema, identified potential new therapies to prevent this life-threatening condition, and revealed new insights about the disease that the physiological breathing motion of the lungs exacerbates drug toxicity-induced edema.
He will be honored as the 2013 SOT Leading Edge in Basic Science Award recipient at the upcoming SOT 2013 Annual Meeting and ToxExpo Award Ceremony, which will be held on Sunday, March 10 at the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center. This award is presented to those scientists who, based on his/her research, has made a recent (within the last 5 years), seminal scientific contribution/advance to understanding fundamental mechanisms of toxicity. The recipient should be a respected basic scientist whose research findings are likely to have a pervasive impact on the field of toxicology. Dr. Ingber will be presenting the Leading Edge in Basic Science Award Lecture on Tuesday, March 12 at 8:00 am in the Grand Ballroom C2.