Prof. Marco Rasponi from the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering, Politecnico di Milano is among the authors of the study 'Cholangiocarcinoma-on-a-chip: A human 3D platform for personalised medicine', recently published in the Journal of Hepatology Reports.

The study presents a chip which, despite being only a few centimetres in size, hides a three-dimensional and highly faithful model of a biliary tract cancer called cholangiocarcinoma, complete with its tumour microenvironment. This 3D model is built starting from a sample of patient’s cancer cells and thus it represents a patient-specific ‘organ-on-chip’: a technology made possible only through a multidisciplinary approach that merges biomedicine, physics and engineering.
The ultimate goal of the device is to accelerate research on cholangiocarcinoma by providing a new laboratory model that better mimics what we observe in patients. At the same time, it will help advancing precision medicine, since it could be potentially used as a personalized drug-testing platform, helping predict patients’ response to therapies.

The innovative prototype, funded by AIRC - the Italian Foundation for Cancer Research, is a result of the collaboration among Prof. Rasponi, Prof. Ana Lleo De Nalda from Humanitas University, and the group of Prof. Guido Torzilli, Director of the Department of General Surgery and head of the Hepatobiliary Surgery Unit of the IRCCS Istituto Clinico Humanitas.