DeLIVERY

INTRODUCTION

DeLIVERY aims to significantly improve the quality of life for Europeans aged 65 and above by ultimately enabling patient-specific, personalized treatment plans, thereby reducing negative polypharmacy effects and related hospital admissions. We have asked Leo what it is about and why it is important. What is it about? Leo: “DeLIVERY aims to offer a new capability to study, understand, and counter-act polypharmacy, which is currently not well understood. It will deploy a radically new way of culturing and imaging liver tissue based on disruptive technological firsts and it will also generate a range of new drugs to improve liver morphology.”

Why is it important?

Leo: “While the rest of the world, in particular the US and Asia, focuses on biomedical research using animal models, animal-free research is a genuine European goal and innovation. The DeLIVERY consortium comprises the complete value chain from basic science (molecular biomedicine), and applied development (optical system, microfluidics, camera technology, chemical synthesis) to manufacturing and to applications. Our partners will offer excellent young researchers first-hand participation in exciting and innovative new technology development to facilitate animal-free research.“

AIM

DeLIVERY aims to build radically new technology for personalized health care, which provides, for the first time, the possibility to investigate polypharmacy on individual patients. Polypharmacy is the effect that the many combinations and permutations of drug mixtures which are typically prescribed to the chronically sick or the elderly population (e.g. painkillers, beta blockers, blood thinners, anti-depressants, and statins) have on the human body. Polypharmacy is becoming a major issue in the ageing population, as well over 10% of hospital admissions for people over 60 years of age are due to currently unknown interactions of the multiple drugs being prescribed by the specialized physicians and general practitioners routinely visited by the elderly. Currently, no single platform exists that can be utilized in a highly parallelized fashion to monitor such effects at the cellular and tissue level.

METHODOLOGY

DeLIVERY aims to provide an integrated microphysiological system (MPS) culture and microscopic imaging platform specifically for the purpose of maintaining, treating and long-term imaging of patient-specific cells within their microenvironment. Novel medicines with the potential to reverse the effects of ageing and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) will be tested within typical polypharmacy contexts to determine possible interactions, and the DeLIVERY MPS system will be the purpose-built platform to provide this service. Such a system also requires a paradigm shift in microscopy - away from the single, bulky instrument providing one imaging modality towards compact, modular, yet still high-end, devices.

IMPACT

This MPS platform will allow physicians, biomedical scientists, and researchers to determine the individual response of human tissue biopsies to a combination of multiple drugs. If successful, DeLIVERY will enable individualized treatment options providing essential tools towards a better quality of life for older people by allowing improved personalized healthcare.