Organoids, microengineering, bioengineering… These are terms that until not long ago sounded like science fiction, but that today are already a reality in laboratories. While some use these tools to expand understanding of biology and functionality of each of the parts that make up an organ, others use them to create drugs that solve their dysfunctions. Or, what is the same, that they cure diseases.
As? Let’s imagine a tiny world, just one square millimeter or, at most, two. Where everything is measured in microns. A minispace – rather, microenvironment – dedicated to the reproduction of human tissues and cells in a specific area of the body. For example, the intestine. «We recreate the architecture of a location. With mother cells “We managed to develop the villi of the cavity, the roughness of its walls,” explains José Luis García Cordero, bioengineer.
But there is more: «We can complicate everything. We introduce bacteria from the microbiota, viruses… We even reproduce an inflammatory lesion,” continues García Cordero. And all this for what? «We search a new way of developing drugs with systems that reproduce in vitro human models. A more effective alternative to the current way of searching for therapeutic targets. Because we must find alternatives to the development of drugs different from those of the last 50 years.
What they recreate in these in vitro microspaces is very similar to what happens in the intestine. “If we take a histological section and compare it with one from a patient, we observe the similarity: the epithelial cells, the formation of the mucosa…”, continues García Cordero.
This institute located in the Swiss city of Basel is an innovative step in the pharmaceutical industry because it uses the latest in research in organoids, human model systems and translational bioengineering to find the perfect therapy against a disease. In this way the center itself serves as a link between academic and pharmaceutical research. It achieves this thanks to three key cores: exploratory research, bioengineering and translation of results, all supported by cutting-edge technological platforms.