UNLOOC: Unlocking data content of Organ-on-Chips

UNLOOC: Unlocking data content of Organ-on-Chips

Funding programme: Chips JU

Budget: 18 Mio Euro

Duration: 3 years (May 2024-April 2027)

EU-OPENSCREEN is a beneficiary in the Chips JU project UNLOOC which aims to develop groundbreaking Organ-on-Chips (OOC) technologies to mitigate the challenges posed by use of animals in drug development and testing. The three-year project unifies 51 partners from industry and academia from 10 European countries and is supported with an overall budget of €70 Mio of which €14 Mio comes from the Chips Joint Undertaking and €18 million from national agencies.

The OOC technology to be developed in the UNLOOC project will not only enable controlled drug testing, but also the modelling of disease pathophysiology. The capabilities of the new OOC platform will be showcased in five use cases:

1. Off-the-shelf 3D organ models replicating human diversity by using a highly innovative cryopreservation method.
2. Developing market-ready single-organ and multi-organ smart OOC multi-well plates.
3. Designing artificial epithelium to assess transdermal drug delivery, skin penetration, absorbance, and toxicity validated in a toxicity and drug delivery scenario.
4. Designing a blood brain barrier platform that is affordable for biomedical research labs and scalable for contract research organisations (CROs).
5. Developing an advanced lung-on-a-chip platform to better assess the safety of new drug candidates.

Together with our partner sites Universidade de Santiago de Compostela (USC) and Centro de Investigación Príncipe Felipe (CIPF), EU-OPENSCREEN will lead the work package on validation and demonstration of the new devices in an real end-user environment. Within UNLOOC we follow our mission to support innovation and public-private-partnerships in drug discovery in Europe.