Heart and Lung Researchers Earn Grant

Two of Harvard’s biomedical engineering professors have been awarded a $3.3 million federally funded grant to develop a “Heart-Lung Micromachine” that can test the effectiveness and safety of cardiopulmonary drugs.

The grant—awarded by the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health—is part of a recent effort by federal agencies to promote the development of new scientific approaches to testing medical technologies.

The team at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences will be led by Donald E. Ingber, director of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, and by Kevin “Kit” K. Parker.

Ingber and Parker will build tiny three-dimensional models of internal organs that mimic biological processes.

The grant will allow the researchers to model the heart and the lungs within a single device that Parker described as a “cardio-pulmonary system on a chip.”

Using this device, they will be able to measure the real-time impact of a new drug or therapy on the heart and lungs—potentially a more efficient alternative to using more traditional animal testing methods.

“With this kind of tool, we can do all sorts of toxicity studies on new drugs and move to a... [new] model about how the lung and the heart work together,” Parker said.

Parker had already begun the initial stages of the project last spring, which he admitted to be a complicated machine.

“This is going to be hard as heck to pull off,” Parker said.

In addition to the Harvard team, the FDA and NIH also awarded grants totalling $9.4 million to three other teams at the University of Michigan, Washington University in St. Louis, and Pennsylvania-based MB Research Laboratories, Inc.

—Staff writer Gautam S. Kumar can be reached at gkumar@college.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Evan T.R. Rosenman can be reached at erosenm@fas.harvard.edu.