Establishing the Long-Term Vision for a Radical New Healthcare Technology

Enabling Doctors to Make More Informed Decisions for Better Health Outcomes; Personalized Treatments Tailored to a Patient’s Unique Biology & Disease

Researchers know that people respond differently to foods, drugs, and chemicals. For example, a medication may be effective in one individual, while it makes another even more ill. However, doctors routinely prescribe medications to patients via informed guesswork - currently there’s no way to test how a treatment plan would affect a specific person, before administering it to them.

The promise of precision medicine is that when a patient is sick, a clinician will be able to develop a tailored treatment plan that takes into account that patient’s unique biology. Better information about how a patient will respond to a disease and to a subsequent treatment will help doctors make more informed decisions. The question is, how do we deliver on this promise?

“By flowing drugs through Organ-Chips containing a patient’s own cells and tissue, we could predict which treatment is most beneficial for that patient”

—Clive Svendsen, PhD, Cedars-Sinai Regenerative Medicine Institute

Waste in the U.S. healthcare system is $760 billion to $935 billion annually, or 25% of total medical spending, according to a new analysis published in JAMA. Key issues in treating patients include failure of care delivery, failure of care coordination, over-treatment or low-value care. To combat this ineffectiveness, health plans are increasingly paying for care via value-based models that reward doctors and hospitals for achieving quality measures and improving patient outcomes.

In the effort to provide clinicians with better information about their patients and improve patient health outcomes, Lewis worked with experts across the health sector to formulate a vision and prototype for radical new precision medicine offering.  This “Patient-on-a-Chip” program holds the potential to advance the field of precision medicine and provide clinicians with a new system that more accurately predicts an individual’s response to foods, medicines, and chemicals.