The Queen Mary + Emulate Organs-on-Chips Centre is supporting a new initiative to use predictive in vitro models, also known as organ-chips, in the fight against COVID-19.

Emulate, Inc is participating in the Organs-on-Chips against COVID-19 initiative (#OoCovid) and donating a set of Organ-Chips to the UK Organ-on-a-Chip Technologies Network which is run by Prof Hazel Screen and Prof Martin Knight. This donation will enable researchers to use the chips for COVID-19 research to help accelerate development of therapeutics against SARS-CoV-2.

The repositioning and re-purposing of drugs is an essential feature of current efforts to find treatments for COVID-19. Emulate’s current commercial products include the Liver-Chip, Proximal Tubule Kidney-Chip, and Intestine-Chip models. These models have the potential to provide key data on the safety and toxicity of drug candidates to improve translation of preclinical animal data and as such can increase confidence in phase I clinical trials. Additionally, Emulate has also developed an Alveolus Lung-Chip and an Airway Lung-Chip.

Members of the UK Organ-on-a-Chip Technologies Network are eligible to apply to use these chips through the QM-Emulate Organs-on-Chips Centre. https://www.cpm.qmul.ac.uk/emulate/covid-19/

Queen Mary has also established a group focused on using different organ-on-a-chip models for covid-19 related research and development activity: https://www.cpm.qmul.ac.uk/covid19/

For more information on how Organ-Chips can accelerate drug development for infectious diseases, such as COVID-19, please see Emulate’s webinar https://www.emulatebio.com/lung-chip-covid-19-webinar-registration-s

Only by doing our best can we speed up research together #organonchipdonation #covid19 #covid19testing #coronavirus #coronavirustesting

Updated by: Martin Knight