Prof. Doron Gerber had completed his PhD focusing on membrane proteins at the Weizmann Institute of Science when he decided that adding technology to his expertise in biology and biophysics was a good idea. As a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, he went on to train in microfluidics with Prof. Stephen Quake, the scientist who invented integrated microfluidic technology, which enables the minimization and automation of experimental processes. For more than a decade, Prof. Gerber has been developing microfluidic chips in his laboratory at BIU’s Mina and Everard Goodman Faculty of Life Sciences, demonstrating their tremendous potential for scaling up experiments in biology, physics, and chemistry while significantly lowering time and costs, thus accelerating medical innovation. their patients’ present illnesses. We housed them in different rooms on one chip and tested the response of each patient’s sample to all eight drugs simultaneously. The small volume we work with allowed us to use cancer cells originating in pleural effusion, excess fluid accumulated around the lung. The oncologist must clear out this fluid in any event so that the patient can breathe.” Prof. Gerber emphasizes that they used available material left over from a necessary procedure that otherwise would have been discarded. “The results of the chip experiments revealed that none of the samples responded to the first drug; in two samples there was no response at all to the second drug, while in six others, 30% to 90% of the cancer cells died.” With these results, Prof. Gerber returned to his partners and learned that all 10 samples belonged to patients who had already developed a tolerance to the first drug—just as the chip results showed. Two patients died within days after being treated with the second drug; like their samples, the patients themselves did not respond to this treatment. And the samples in which 90% of the cancer cells died belonged to the patients who responded well to the drug. “This retrospective correlation indicates the potential to predict—in a very short time—individual responses to treatments and that we may be able to direct oncologists to the most promising one for a specific patient.” Now, Prof. Gerber and his partners are seeking to commercialize their microfluidic chip through UnBox, BIU’s acceleration program. Slashing Costs and Time For each collaborative study of this type, a specific microfluidic chip, including its templates and optic detector, must be designed and engineered, and the computational analysis system must be adapted. Also needed are the biological capabilities to carry out the experiments. Prof. Gerber and his multidisciplinary team are doing it all. And so they did in another joint project with the pharmaceutical company Teva to develop antibody drugs. “The benefit of the microfluidic chip for advancing this worldwide quest to produce novel biological drugs, such as targeted therapies for cancer, is evident,” says Prof. Gerber. Antibody drug development is a long and extremely expensive process. A fundamental bottleneck occurs at a stage called antibody affinity maturation, in which researchers create 100–400 variants from a targeted antibody (the lead antibody), aiming to engineer them to be more pathogen-specific, stable and safe, and not to trigger an immune response or cause side effects. “Developing these variants in cells, the common method today, requires producing each of them from the cells, then cleaning and testing them to determine which indeed works better than our lead. At the end of this process, which takes months and costs $100,000 per variant, only two to five variants will be found good enough to continue with to the next stage,” says Prof. Gerber. 44
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