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@Dr. Donald Ingber

Medicine measures everything in time: the “golden hour” of trauma, the narrow window before tissue dies or the time to intervene in sepsis. In drug development, time is on a different scale. More than a decade can pass from bench to bedside, often consuming billions of dollars in research and development. For Dr. Donald Ingber, the founding director of Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, biological clocks are negotiable.

For more than a decade, Ingber’s lab has been building what he calls Human Organ Chips—a microscopic window to the activity inside human cells. “[These are] small, optically clear, devices the size of a thumb drive that contain hollow channels lined by living human cells and tissues, perfused dynamically with fluids and exposed to relevant physical cues, such as breathing motions in lung or peristalsis in intestine, which recreate organ-level structures and functions.”

The point is a safe and representative human beta site or a testing ground. The chips, Ingber says, “provide the ability to carry out human-relevant experiments analyzing the effects of drugs, toxins, pathogens and other environmental exposures without requiring human clinical studies.” This can accelerate preclinical drug development, help select the right patients for clinical trials and thereby increase success rate and reduce costs.

That language held considerable weight in the past year. In April 2025, the FDA published its roadmap to reduce, refine or potentially replace animal testing in preclinical safety studies, naming organoids and organ-on-a-chip systems as a core new approach methodology. Three months later, the NIH announced it would no longer fund proposals that rely exclusively on animal data. Ingber also argues that if organ chips are created from the individual’s own cells, they could play a more significant role in personalizing medicine, by providing a “way to assess the effects of drugs on individual patients or defined populations.”

Yet, in a January 2026 paper in Cell Stem Cell, Ingber argued that despite the regulatory tailwind, organ chips have not yet been integrated into drug-development pipelines. The reason, he says, is more human than scientific. “The biggest bottleneck is human nature: people don’t like to change the way they do things,” Ingber tells me. “Toxicologists are particular averse to risk, and for good reasons. Also, the Organ Chips are currently low-throughput, expensive compared to other in vitro models (but not animals), and they require staff with different skills or existing staff to learn new ones.”

The economics, though, are starting to catch up. A 2022 study from his group estimated that a single validated liver-chip workflow could save the pharmaceutical industry $3 billion by replacing a single toxicity test. Just the tip of the iceberg. “[We estimate] savings of roughly $27 billion by preventing late-stage drug failures in clinical trials that would not be predicted by animal models.” And that, he notes, is just toxicology. “There would be additional savings from replacing animal models with human disease models and identify drug targets in a more human-relevant way.”

Given this potential, his team is working on multiple chip-related projects, from reproductive organs to lymph nodes to lung and intestine. When asked about his most futuristic project, Ingber says: “We are currently funded by ARPA-H to develop a Broad-Spectrum Therapeutic that stimulates the immune system to fight against a wide range of viral infections as well as many different types of cancer - this is a single drug.”

Some of Ingber's chips have left the planet. “In a NASA and BARDA funded project, we have created Bone Marrow Chips lined with individual ARTEMIS II astronauts' cells which recently flew around the Moon and back on the ARTEMIS II mission to demonstrate the usefulness of Organ Chips to study the effects of spaceflight-associated exposure to cosmic radiation and microgravity.” Why is this important? “[These chips] would likely be equally useful to protect healthy tissues in cancer patients receiving radiotherapy or during nuclear disasters as well as to reverse bone and muscle loss in bedridden and elderly patients,” he replies. But there is, of course, a direct effect for space medicine. “Man will not be able to travel to Mars without developing ways to protect against cosmic radiation, which can increase abruptly to lethal levels (e.g., with hard-to-predict solar flares). The effects of microgravity on bone loss, muscle wasting, and immune cell suppression are also major problems.”