Professor Yi-Chin Toh
is a leader in organ-on-a-chip technology, an alternative model for testing therapeutic drugs that can be more accurate, affordable and ethical than traditional methods. Therapeutic drugs and many diseases affect the body as a system, so testing drugs on individual cell cultures fails to capture critical organ interactions that influence drug response. Researchers often resort to animal testing to overcome this problem, but this method is expensive, ethically fraught and doesn’t always reflect how human systems behave. Professor Toh has engineered modular microenvironments that mimic organ function, and can be connected to test drug response as a systemic whole. This platform has accurately and more rapidly predicted chemotherapy responses in cancer patients, and identified whether drugs will cause life-threatening skin reactions due to interactions between the liver, immune system and skin.
Watch Yi-Chin talk about her research
Find Prof Toh’s QUT Academic Profile here.
Read and download the Preclinical Modelling Capability Statement
