Miniature chip mimics marrow to reshape blood cancer treatment

Researchers at NYU Tandon School of Engineering, led by Weiqiang Chen, have developed a credit-card-sized “leukemia-on-a-chip” device that replicates the bone marrow environment and a functioning human immune response. This miniature chip mimics the three key regions of bone marrow—blood vessels, marrow cavity, and bone lining—and supports patient-derived bone marrow cells to self-assemble and sustain immune activity. Using high-resolution imaging, the team observed immune cells, including engineered CAR T-cells, actively hunting and killing cancer cells in real time, providing unprecedented insights into immunotherapy dynamics and revealing phenomena like the “bystander effect,” where immune cells activate others beyond their direct targets. This chip-based platform addresses major limitations of current testing methods, such as slow, imprecise animal models and standard lab tests that fail to capture the complex cellular environment of cancer-immune interactions. It enables rapid, controlled experiments simulating clinical outcomes like remission, resistance, and relapse, and demonstrated that