Collaborative Research: CPS: Medium: AI-Boosted Precision Medicine through Continual in situ Monitoring of Microtissue Behaviors on Organs-on-Chips

Cancers are among the leading causes of death around the world, with an estimated annual mortality of close to 10 million. Despite significant efforts to develop effective cancer diagnosis and therapeutics, the ability to predict patient responses to anti-cancer therapeutic agents remains elusive. This is a critical milestone as getting the right choice of therapy early can mean superior anti-tumor outcomes and increased survival, while the wrong choice means tumor relapse, development of resistance, side effects without the desired benefit, and increased cost of treatment. An cyber-physical system that allows an accurate prediction of patient tumor responses to anti-cancer therapies; that is, enable real-time precision medicine, can have a transformative effect not only on health outcomes, but also on the costs of treatment. The goal of this project is therefore to develop an engineered cyber-physical system that combines advanced biological models with state-of-the-art artificial intelligence methods for predictive, automated screening of anti-cancer drugs and optimizations of their dosing. This will move science towards realizing the long-desired precision medicine paradigm leading to significant social impacts. The project has additional social impacts, including minimizing the exponentially growing ethical issues surrounding the use of animals in the past years through increased adoption of the engineered human cancer and heart tissue model systems. The project will provide opportunities to promote STEM education for K-12 students, train students, especially those from under-represented groups, and disseminate science and engineering knowledge to the public.

The investigators will leverage their expertise in biofabrication, tissue engineering, microfluidics, bioanalysis, and artificial intelligence to develop a generalized, self-dose-optimizing "multi-sensor-integrated multi-organ-on-a-chip" platform, which can be used to accurately predict both efficacy and safety of anti-cancer regimens in this project. The first innovation is the adoption of three-dimensional bioprinting for generating the vascularized ductal carcinoma model and vascularized cardiac tissue model, leading to the construction of a truly biomimetic human myocardium for evaluating drug toxicity. The adaptation of both of the bioprinted models to microfluidic systems is also a major innovation. Additionally, the real-time yet non-invasive monitoring of key biophysicochemical parameters will generate large-scale multi-dimensional data to enable accurate data-driven predictive modeling. Moreover, the platform will enable self-dose-optimization on the chips through a novel joint Bayes modeling implemented by two deep learning models capable of addressing multiple-instance learning, and dependency in sequences of multi-dimensional data, respectively. The project will use a range of commercially available cells to construct models and pursue the initial platform development and optimizations. Extensions are anticipated for human specimens in future iterations and other cancer treatment, drug combination, and dose optimization in anti-cancer regimens as a rapid and safe testing-bed.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

Award Number: 2525091
Principal Investigator: Ming Shao
Funds Obligated: $275,957
State: MA