A world-class in vitro models facility for the UK community, reducing the barriers to adoption to drive animal replacement

Hazel’s award will enable the expansion of the QMUL Centre for Predictive in vitro Models as a large-scale bioengineering facility supporting the fabrication and use of organ-on-chip technology across the UK in industry and academia. The funding supports the purchase of equipment and consumables, the provision of hands-on training and the development of an online resource to share the ‘know-how’ for adopting on-chip technologies to replace the use of animals.

This award was made as part of the 2024 non-animal methods infrastructure grants supported with funding from the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT).

We aim to establish the most comprehensive, world-class organ-chip facility in the UK, make it accessible as a community resource, and use it as a platform to advance organ-chip development, with an emphasis on translation of approaches into the in-vivo community in academia and industry.

Through our ongoing leadership of the UK organ-chip community, we have brought together our stakeholders to agree on the range of equipment we should house to deliver a flexible resource, which best supports the broad spectrum of activity in this field. Working with the technology providers, the bioengineers and biologist building models, the in-vivo research community interested in replacement approaches, the industrial parties looking for better models for drug development, and the regulators, we have planned a facility which brings state-of-the-art in both commercially available organ-chip platform technology, and in the bioprinting technology required to design and build custom chips.

We will focus on establishing an infrastructure in which users can access the centre and use equipment, also ensuring there is full service cover and technical support available to all users for at least the next 5 years, enabling us to provide crucial user training to establish a community of competent users.

We will prioritise projects using the facility that show strong technology translation and animal replacement impact. To achieve this, we will encourage all facility users to have an in-vivo end-user or industrial collaborator in their project team, ensure projects are addressing qualification and standardisation of approaches, and work with users to encourage them to publish protocols through the NC3Rs Gateway and test repeatability where feasible.

We will also use the investment to further our efforts in raising awareness of organ-chip approaches. In addition to furthering our activity talking at AWERBs and in-vivo user events UK-wide, we will prepare materials for more detailed ‘awareness events’ which we will run for in-vivo users at least twice a year to demystify replacement technologies. We will also plan and run a high-profile launch event for the facility, and will set up a website with information and support on using organ-chip approaches.