Technology Nominated for Design of Year Award, To Be Featured in Exhibitions at MoMA in New York and Design Museum in London
Emulate, Inc., today announced that the company’s Organs-on-Chips technology has been recognized by two international museums in exhibitions that showcase original creations that exemplify innovative design. The Organs-on-Chips are currently on view at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and will also be exhibited at the Design Museum in London. In addition, the Organs-on-Chips technology has been nominated for the Design Museum’s award for Design of the Year 2015.
The MoMA exhibition, entitled “This Is For Everyone: Design Experiments for the Common Good,” includes three Organs-on-Chips, the Lung-on-Chip, the Gut-on-Chip, and the Liver-on-Chip, along with videos depicting their functionality in predicting the human biology and modeling human responses to medicines, chemicals and diseases. The MoMA exhibition, which opened on February 14, 2015, will run through January 2016 featuring design works that celebrate the promise of contemporary design.
This Is For Everyone: Design Experiments for the Common Good
— MoMA
The Organs-on-Chips are also featured in the Design Museum in London’s Design of the Year awards and exhibition recognizing the most innovative, interesting, high-impact and forward-looking designs from all over the world. Emulate’s Lung-on-Chip and Gut-on-Chip will be on display at the Designs of the Year 2015 Exhibition, which will be open to the public in London from March 25 to August 16, 2015. The Organs-on-Chips are nominated in the award’s Product category and recognized for their ability to emulate human organ-level functions and offer a transformative impact on human health. Other nominated designs include a do-it-yourself computer coding kit and Google’s self driving car.
“We are honored to receive such prestigious recognition for our technology from the world’s top design experts, practitioners, curators and academics. Emulate is working to design better products for improving human health across many industries, including pharmaceuticals, healthcare, agriculture and consumer health,” said Geraldine A. Hamilton, Ph.D., President and Chief Scientific Officer of Emulate. “Organs-on-Chips represent a new technology platform that provides a window into the inner workings of human biology and opens up entirely new possibilities to design better and safer products, as well as applications in personalized health for consumers.”
Emulate is commercializing the Organs-on-Chips technology that is based on pioneering work conducted by Donald Ingber, M.D., Ph.D. and his team at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University. The Organs-on-Chips are designed to recreate human biology, emulating dynamics of organs at the cellular level with unprecedented precision, reproducibility and control. Each Organ-on-Chip can contain tens of thousands of cells in tiny, hollow channels and is approximately the size of a memory stick. A key part of the design includes the ability of the Organs-on-Chips to recreate mechanical forces and the dynamic physical microenvironment that is essential part of living organs, including flow and stretching similar to that seen during breathing and peristalsis, which enables them to replicate human biology and function.
“Emulate has elegantly integrated biology, engineering and design to create Organs-on-Chips that mimic human biological function and create a new paradigm that can profoundly impact human health,” said David Edwards, Ph.D., Professor at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, founder and director of Le Laboratoire Paris, founder of Le Lab Cambridge, and member of Emulate’s Scientific Advisory Board. “It is exciting to see the Organs-on-Chips technology as part of these exhibitions on public display, so that members of the community can get a first-hand view of a technology that is in the midst of transforming many products that impact our everyday lives, from medications to cosmetics products to a person’s own cells on a chip.”
Organs-on-Chips for Human Bioemulation
Emulate’s Organs-on-Chips platform represents a unique human bioemulation system with human cells living in an engineered microenvironment that accurately recapitulates human organ biology. Human Organs-on-Chips are miniaturized engineered biochips that contain tiny hollow channels lined by living human cells and tissues cultured under continuous fluid flow and mechanical forces, such as cyclic breathing and peristalsis, which effectively recapitulate organ-level physiology and disease responses. In Emulate’s automated platform, different Organs-on-Chips, such as lung, liver, intestine, kidney, skin, eye, and blood-brain-barrier, can be linked together by flowing liquid containing nutrients or that simulates blood or blood itself to create a “Human-Body-on-Chips” to more closely replicate whole body-level responses.
About Emulate
Emulate, Inc. is a private company focused on commercializing Organs-on-Chips as an automated human bioemulation platform that achieves a new standard for mimicking true human physiology so that responses to medicines, chemicals and diseases can be accurately predicted. Through co-innovation with collaborators and internal programs, Emulate is advancing product innovation, design and safety across a range of applications in drug development, personalized medicine, agriculture and chemical-based consumer products. For more information, visit www.emulatebio.com.
