The National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences granted the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine $7.8 million to create a new drug discovery center. 

The center will be called the Pitt Translational Center for Microphysiology Systems and will be managed within Pitt’s Drug Discovery Institute. The center’s researchers will use human “liver-on-a-chip” systems in collaboration with the Food and Drug Administration to improve drug discovery and development, according to Pittwire. The center will “qualify” these chips as drug discovery tools and submit the results to the FDA for approval. 

Microphysiology systems, also called organs-on-chips, replicate the physiological environment and functions of human organs and can be used to predict drug responses in disease models. They can also be used to evaluate drug safety while decreasing dependency on animal testing. 

“We are honored to have been selected as one of four translational centers in the country to receive this funding,” D. Lansing Taylor, the contact principal investigator and director of the Drug Discovery Institute, told Pittwire. “We will pursue a precision medicine approach in the qualification of our liver MPS considering patient genetic and lifestyle/environment characteristics in our analyses.”