At KIT we are looking for ethical, accessible model systems  by combining the power of iPSCs from individual patients  and 3D-tissue engineering in understanding normal development and disease states, reconstruct test ex vivo systems for personalized medicine and reconstruct building blocks for organs and tissues.  At KIT we have the opportunity to finally test all  tissues and other additive manufactured devices in humanized mice, rats or fish in accordance with the 3R principles – Reduce –Replace-Refine- and to fuel the whole pipeline from Bench to Bedside through innovation transfer.

The 3D-reconstruction of tissues either for all kinds of preclinical testings or for human organ/ tissue replacements is becoming one of the disruptive technologies that besides the digitalization will have an enormous impact on health Technologies of the future. Tissue reconstruction requires a highly interdisciplinary team of scientists from biology, chemistry, engineering to data science and market analysts and platform technologies such as tissue culture automation and imaging facilities. At KIT the tissue model unit will serve as an enabler by providing expertise in all kinds of 3D tissue generation.

With the creation of many iPSC centers in Europe and worldwide the availability of the genetically and epigenetically diverse patient derived cells as well as cells from different life spans such as cells from babies to elderly patients is increasing. At KIT we are currently developing an open-source artificial intelligence based electronic platform  called AIMED (Platform for Artificial Intelligence-Supported Drug Development for Personalized Medication) which can be used for the qualification of any organ-on-a-chip system or animal replacement system. Iterative implementation of the clinical data of drugs that are already on the market and the data derived from several rounds of the organ-on-a-chip development using these drugs as qualification markers should lead to test systems with high performance and quality.

Functional precision medicine through experimentally testing the response of patient-derived cancer cells to anti-cancer therapy in vitro, so-called Drug Sensitivity and Resistance Test (DSRT), has the potential to help identify an individualized patient care through personalized medicine. The DSRT-on-CHIP: will be developed at KIT and is a test on a minute amount of cell material derived from different tumor types (CLL, lung, hean and neck) using a Droplet Microarray (DMA) chip. The possibility of having such a test established in clinics will have a great impact on the success rate of anti-cancer therapy and make a difference for each individual patient.