Zyoxel will collaborate with researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory and MatTek Corp. to develop a circuit of miniature human organs on a chip as part of a five year, up to $26.3 million program awarded by the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The project aims to incorporate 10 micro-engineered living human tissues on a single integrated chip providing a versatile platform to predict the safety of new drugs and vaccines. Zyoxel’s LiverChip™ technology will also be used in a related Cooperative Agreement given to Professor Griffith, Draper Laboratories and researchers at the University of Pittsburgh by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The up to $6.25 million project aims to develop a model of liver metastasis and improve the understanding of how secondary tumours develop away from primary tumour sites. Dr Tim Hart, CEO of Zyoxel said: “Over a third of new drugs fail once they are tested in patients because scientists do not have suitable tools to predict how a drug will affect humans. We are delighted to be working with MIT and our other collaborators on these tissue models which have the capacity to speed the development of new therapies with fewer side-effects.”