Intestine chip to make medical treatments painless in future

Boston: People undergoing medical treatments related to few ailments undergo painful situation. It becomes extreme for people with low pain thresholds.

However, according to the news reported in ibtimes, medical scientists at Cedars-Sinai Board of Governors Regenerative Medicine Institute in collaboration with Emulate, Inc in Boston have come with an intestine chip with integrated systems. These integrated systems can support living human cells in precisely microengineered environments that can more accurately recapitulate human physiology and disease states.

Besides relieving the pain, this method will also reduce the cost of the treatment. It is also expected that animal testing for development of the medicine will also come to an end.
It is not clear when the intestine chip will come into the market but scientists are hopeful to introduce into the market as soon as possible. They are also working to replicate this technology for other crucial organs like brain and heart.

Clive Svendsen, director of the Cedars-Sinai Board of Governors Regenerative Medicine Institute and a co-author of the study, said that “We can produce an unlimited number of copies of this tissue and use them to evaluate potential therapies. This is an important advance in personalized medicine.”

The most painful treatments related to intestine like ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s disease, and irritable bowel syndrome, are very painful and even the medicines have some negative side-effects. In worst cases, it is impossible to perform diagnostic tests if the condition of the patient is bad.

With the new technique of intestine chip, the doctors have to perform just one biopsy and place the tissue sample on Intestine Chip and perform multiple diagnostic tests to pinpoint the infected region, the status of the infection and the effectiveness of medicines over time.

Moreover, doctors can also use stem cells, which can also be grown artificially and transformed into specialized cell types, for testing on the intestine if the patient is too weak for biopsy. Earlier, the stem cells were extracted from bone marrow, adipose tissue and blood. The extraction was done through liposuction or from umbilical cord saved during the birth.