Translating Radical Science & Technology out of the Lab; Founding a Disruptive Start-Up

Replacing Animal Testing with a Human-Centric Technology Platform

The drug development industry has been broken and ineffective for a long time. On average, it takes at least 10 years to bring a new drug to market, at a whopping cost of $2 billion per drug. Only 1 in 20 promising new drugs actually make it all the way through human clinical trials to reach patients. There are over 10,000 diseases, and only around 500 cures - patients need new therapies and treatments.

Currently, drug developers and scientific researchers are limited by their tools. It’s immoral and dangerous to test novel medicines directly in humans, so scientists try and predict how a drug will work by using animals - animal testing has been the standard method for over 100 years. Today, over 100 million animals are used in scientific research every year. However, animals are not humans, and animal biology doesn’t accurately predict how a human will respond to a new disease, drug or chemical. That’s why most drugs eventually fail in human clinical trials, after a huge R&D cost and many years of wasted time.

In 2010, Dr. Donald Ingber and his team at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, published a landmark paper in the Science journal showing that is was possible to mimic human biology outside of the body, via a radical new technology dubbed ‘Organs-on-Chips’.

In 2012, DARPA and the FDA supported the further development of Organs-on-Chips at the Wyss Institute via a $37MM grant. DARPA, a research arm of the United States Department of Defense, has supported the development of some extremely influential technologies since it was founded in 1958. The Internet is perhaps the most famous, but there are many more — like GPS, computer speech recognition, and dog-like robots.

DARPA has a reputation to ask for the impossible, and the objectives they set for the team were immense challenges. For this project, the agency tasked Wyss researchers with developing 10 different Organ-Chips and linking them together with the goal of emulating a human. As well as a potential tool for developing drugs more effectively, the agency also saw the technology as a way to quickly test novel treatments in response to potential biological or chemical attacks, or pandemics.

In 2013, Lewis was invited into the Wyss Institute at Harvard University to work with Dr. Ingber and the Organs-on-Chips founding team. The Wyss Institute’s mission is to translate new technologies out of the lab into the real world, so that they can have broad impact on society.

Lewis’ work included helping to define the strategic vision for the new technology, market positioning to create an entirely new industry space, and product design concepts for translating the technology into an easy-to-use platform for use by every researcher. Lewis also defined the overall narrative for the new technology by framing a TEDx talk to introduce the concept to the world (~1.6MM views), and working on the investor pitch to raise $12MM to form spin-out Emulate, Inc. Emulate was incorporated in 2015 to democratize and commercialize the Organs-on-Chips technology globally.