Organs in a chip | Solange Massa | TEDxJoven@RíodelaPlata

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx

People often ask me
what I do for a living.

And the truth most of the times

it’s very hard for me to explain it.

On the plane while coming here,

I was looking for examples
and saw the Avengers movie,

Age of Ultron.

To those who don’t remember it

or haven’t seen it,
I made you some drawings.

This is the scene: we’re in a lab,

there’s Ultron who’s trying to transfer
his consciousness to a new body.

A more human body, a bioprinted one,

having cells and tissues.

Behind him are the Avengers,
who know nothing about science,

and then a scientist come

who’s going to bioprint Ultron’s body.

In real life, there’s no Ultron,
there’s no Avengers,

but what that scientist did in that scene,

I do it every day.

I’m an Argentine
and I live in the United States.

I’m a doctor and a researcher

and for many years I’ve been
working at Harvard, MIT,

in the Science, Health
and Technology division

printing small organs

we put in a chip to test pharmaceuticals.

What do I mean by pharmaceuticals?

They’re the drugs

you all have in your medicine cabinets.

And for that medicine
to get to your hands,

one billion dollars is spent.

I’ll say it again: one billion dollars.

Y eso es la base, de ahí en más.
And that’s just the base.

It takes more than 10 years,

from the first compost, the molecule,

until the medicine gets to your hands.

To test the medicine is safe and effective,

it needs to go through three basic tests:

trials in cells, trials in animals,

and then trials in humans.

Trials in cells are made in two dimensions,

cells are stuck onto a plastic jar,

the lower and upper parts

have a liquid that
keeps them alive and well.

As you can imagine,
these are in two dimensions,

and they’re nothing like
the three-dimensionality of humans.

Then we go to the animal model,
little animals.

As you can imagine,
this is the best model we have so far

but we’re nothing like rats, right?

Maybe some, but that’s something else.

Then we get to the clinical trials,
with humans,

and here’s where a bunch of medicine

fail for a lot of reasons,

but the two most important ones are:

because they’re not efficient enough,
which means they didn’t have an effect

in the human being,
and also because of toxicity,

they’re toxic and hurt you.

We suggest using organs in a chip.

In the lab, what we do is
we take human cells

and combine them with a hydrogel.

That hydrogel is like a sort of gelatin.

We put it in a bioprinter

and then this bit of tissue
goes inside a closed chip.

And the final goal of these chips

is to replicate the function
of an organ in the microscale,

to know how toxic is a medicine.

But how do we really make the chips?

A small container arrives to the lab,

with human cells, with donors.

They can be from any of you.

We mix that with this hydrogel

and then we put inside a bioprinter.

Then we tell the bioprinter
with a program

which 3D shape we want cells
to adopt with that hydrogel.

And once we have that,
they go inside the chips.

These chips aren’t like computer ones,

they’re plastic chips
that are joint to a bomb

that’s going to pass a flux through them,
and that flux has oxygen

and nourishment to the cells.

Once we know the chips are okay,

we start the trial with medical drugs.

Here I brought you a chip, those
on the back might not see it well.

It fits in the palm of a hand,
as you can see.

Once we have this,
we start testing the drug.

Just so you have an idea,
I worked a lot with a medicine

called Paracetamol.

It’s a medical drug
that’s used for headache,

for toothache, when
you’re not feeling well,

it’s anti-inflammatory.

Using small doses of Paracetamol
in the chip,

we can tell what’s going
to happen in a bigger scale

when it goes to the human being.

Just so you have an idea,
that thing you’re seeing

is the heart in a chip,
you’re seeing it beat,

they’re cardiac fibers before
putting the medicine in them.

The most important thing of all of this

is that chips have sensors

and these sensors will tell us
how the state of the chip.

They’ll measure temperature,
oxygen, protein,

and tell us in real time what’s happening
to that transparent chamber.

Until now, we’ve created
a liver, a heart,

and blood vessels in a chip.

(Applause)

This is my last creation,
a blood vessel in a chip.

In the future, we want to create
bigger and more complex organs.

Above all, we want diversity,

we want all of you to be inside a chip

so we know how you’ll react
to different medicines.

Maybe someday we’ll be able
to print an entire body

and transfer our old consciousness

to that new bioprinted body,
as Ultron tried to.

That’s what we’re working for.

(Applause)