Dr. James “J” Hickman
‘Human-on-a-Chip’
Hesperos Replicates Inter-Connected Organs Systems to Reduce Animal Testing BY MEAGHAN BRANHAM Photography by Julie Fletcher
H
ow many human organs can you fit in your hand? It seems a gruesome question at first, one you’ve (hopefully) never thought about.
But Dr. James “J” Hickman and Mike Shuler have thought about it — in fact, they’ve dedicated their careers to creating a technology that allows a system of human organs, from the heart to the lungs to neurons and more, to be reproduced on microchips that can be inter-connected, and it all can fit right in the palm of your hand. Their creation could be the answer to an ongoing crisis in the world of drug and chemical testing. The pioneers of this “human-on-a-chip” technology have been commercially developing the groundbreaking devices in our own backyard since 2014 out of the Orlando-based facility of Hesperos Inc., founded by Hickman and Shuler. The chips are poised to
22 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2022 | i4Biz.com
eliminate many of the issues that make current pharmaceutical, cosmetic and food testing so difficult: high expense with low success rates, inhumane and inefficient animal testing, and limited opportunity for testing in human trials. “The classic drug development pipeline relies heavily on animal models, and we now know that nine out of 10 drugs that proved safe and effective in animals fail to translate to human studies,” Hickman says. “So that's where this technology slots right in.” Shuler, who has a daughter with Down syndrome, describes the difficulty that comes even with traditional human clinical trials: “One of the caveats of drug development is that different people react differently to any particular drug. For somebody who’s not in the ‘typical’ population, physicians often have trouble
