Thursday, August 2, 2012

DARPA, NIH to fund 'human body-on-a-chip' research

Researchers in the Department of Biological Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology will receive up to $32 million over the next five years from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to develop a technology platform that will mimic human physiological systems in the laboratory, using an array of integrated, interchangeable engineered human tissue constructs.
A cooperative agreement between MIT and DARPA worth up to $26.3 million will be used to establish a new program titled "Barrier-Immune-Organ: MIcrophysiology, Microenvironment Engineered TIssue Construct Systems" (BIO-MIMETICS) at MIT, in collaboration with researchers at the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, MatTek Corp., and Zyoxel Ltd. The BIO-MIMETICS proposal was one of two award winners selected as part of the Microphysiological Systems (MPS) program at DARPA, and will be led by MIT professor Linda Griffith in collaboration with MIT professors Steven Tannenbaum, Darrell Irvine, Paula Hammond, Eric Alm, and Douglas Lauffenburger. Jeffrey Borenstein and Shankar Sundaram will lead the work at Draper Laboratory, Patrick Hayden will lead the work at MatTek,, and David Hughes will lead the work at Zyoxel.

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