Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory and a number of other institutions are developing a “desktop human” model with four surrogate human organs—liver, heart, lung and kidney–interconnected to better mimic the body’s response to new drugs and toxins.

Dr. Rashi Iyer, lead scientist at Los Alamos, commented that the motivation for generating ATHENA came, in large part, because of a push in the past several years to develop alternatives to slow and costly animal testing—alternatives that can better mimic the human physiological environment. She said that the strengths of the ATHENA model include its ability to simulate human organ systems and that it offers rapid and thorough analysis in real time.

The aim of project ATHENA is to develop individual organ components—a liver that metabolizes, a heart that pumps, a lung that breathes and a kidney that excretes—and to integrate their functions with each other to create a model that will enable researchers to better understand the effect of chemicals and drugs on humans. While the generation of individual, miniaturized organs has become more attainable over time, “[l]inking these [miniorgans] in a physiologically relevant fashion is where the major technological challenges lie,” according to Dr. Dan Huh, biomedical engineer at the University of Pennsylvania.

Click here to watch a short video clip regarding ATHENA and to meet the researchers working on this project. And as always, please send any questions or comments you may have to sciencecorner@navs.org. I look forward to hearing from you.

–Dr. Pam Osenkowski, Director of Science Programs