A new digital healthcare program at a Los Angles hospital dubbed “patient on a chip” holds new promise to better predict how and when people get sick.

The patient-on-a-chip program from Cedars-Sinai uses precision medicine, data analytics, mobile apps and stem cell science to re-create a person’s cells and personal biology on a computer chip to better detect disease patterns and other conditions, Cedars-Sinai says.

Using chip technology, Cedars-Sinai scientists can harvest cells from the blood or skin of an individual and reprogram them into induced stem cells, which can be made into any organ cell, such as those from the lung, liver or intestine, and each bearing the unique genetic fingerprint and characteristics of the person, says Clive Svendsen, director of the board of governors for Cedars-Sinai Regenerative Medicine Institute.

Each chip, which is approximately the size of an AA battery, features tiny channels lined with tens of thousands of living human cells, re-creating the smallest functional unit of an organ.

Air and fluid, such as blood, can be passed through the chips, creating a “micro-engineered” environment that is a “home-away-from-home” for cells, where they behave just as they do in the body, Svendsen says.

“Scientists could create a living model of a patient with Parkinson’s disease or Crohn’s disease, a debilitating inflammatory bowel disorder linked to several gene mutations,” Svendsen says. “By flowing drugs through organ chips containing the patient’s own cells and tissue, we could predict which treatment is most beneficial for that patient.”

Cedars-Sinai researchers are working to develop patient-on-a-chip applications with Emulate Inc., a Boston healthcare technology company that develops software, services, mobile apps and research workflow procedures to emulate human biology to understand how diseases, medicines, chemicals and food affect human health.

The company’s initial system is for drug development applications. “By creating a personalized patient-on-a-chip, we can really begin to understand how diseases, medicines, chemicals and foods affect an individual’s health,” says NAME?, Emulate president and chief scientific officer.

The work on patient on a chip is very early on, says Cedar-Sinai. As of now, research scientists and Emulate say they have proven the technology in laboratory environment with detailed scientific process details in a new article published in Cellular and Molecular Gastroenterology and Hepatology, a journal of the American Gastroenterology Association. Clinical trials have yet to be developed.

In the future, a patient-on-a-chip technology could be used to predict how a disease progresses in an individual, allowing for the design of personalized regimens to promote wellness and prevent disease, says Robert Barrett, an assistant professor of medicine at Cedars-Sinai and senior author of the study. Other applications include designing clinical trials to identify at-risk populations for adverse drug reactions, he says.

Funding for the project is $15 million provided by the National Institutes of Health

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