Enabling Human Tissue Testing Before Clinical Trials or Animal Studies

Our foundational organ-on-a-chip technology is PREDICT96: a multiplexed, single-organ system that models and captures data on how compounds and functioning human tissue interact.

PREDICT96 houses microphysiological models that replicate specific organs. Designed to work with industry-standard 96-well testing equipment, this high-throughput technology enables rapid parallel testing of dozens of compounds in one plate with robust replicability and statistical power.

With PREDICT96, researchers can observe tissue response in real time—for example, immune cell interaction with tissues, blood cell extravasation in a model of drug-induced vascular injury or barrier integrity in a model of gastrointestinal inflammatory bowel disease.

Using multiple, clinically relevant measures of tissue function, PREDICT96 enables human tissue testing before clinical trials or even animal studies begin.

By making it possible to identify successful therapies earlier, advanced tissue model systems like PREDICT96 could improve FDA approval rates by as much as 50 percent according to recent studies. If our platform could make clinical trials even 25 percent more selective, a drug developer could save costs exceeding $600 million on an approved drug and shave years off time to market.

High-Throughput and Precise Control in a Compact Design

Most microfluidic human organ systems host no more than 12 biological replicates, and often require selective incubators and large overall footprints per sample density. Draper’s platform can host 96 replicates simultaneously.

Draper’s PREDICT96 platform uses 192 integrated pumps. These pumps allow for exquisite control of upper and lower channel flow conditions for each organ model—limiting the dilution of excreted factors and creating a more realistic tissue environment.

The disposable plate houses an assembly of bonded layers, including a fluidic layer to precisely route fluids that mimic blood flow. A durable, or potentially disposable, actuator lid houses fluidic control elements and the pumps. Sensors and probes in the modules measure tissue and barrier function—enabling the prediction of human response to compounds in a way that testing tissue using animal models or static Petri dish cell cultures cannot.

PREDICT96 can be programmed to operate continuously with little intervention. The overall system is compact and small enough that dozens of them can fit into an incubator.

Generated Tissue Models to Date

• Lower Airway
• Liver
• Gastrointestinal (Ileum and Colon)
• Blood-Brain Barrier
• Upper Airway
• Vascular 
• Solid Tumor/immunoncology 
• Proximal Tubule
• Glomerulus
• Reproductive Tract
• Skin Microbiome 

A Versatile Enabling Technology for Human Health Studies  

PREDICT96 is a versatile technology with immense potential to enhance human health research. Our roadmap aims to bring the benefits of organ-on-a-chip technology out of the research laboratory and into the standard pharmaceutical manufacturing environment.

We are adapting PREDICT96 to support drug and therapeutic development by

• Advancing immunotherapy with a platform called PREDICT-Ion , which models immune cell interaction with patient-specific ex vivo tumor and tissue fragments.
• Interconnecting single organ models on our Multi-Organ Platform for testing absorption, distribution, metabolism and excretion (ADME) of candidate drugs.
• Developing the first model of the human lung (PREDICT96-ALI) with demonstrated correlation to in vivo outcomes of SARS-CoV-2 therapeutics.