Best University for Product Design

The Institute's design joins five other category winners from Architecture, Fashion, Transport, Digital and Graphics design

Human organs–on–chips, which have been awarded the Product prize by London's Design Museum, have the potential to deliver transformative changes to human health, drug discovery, drug testing, and personalized medicine, due to their accurate ability to emulate human–level organ functions. Credit: Wyss Institute at Harvard University

(BOSTON) — The Wyss Institute's human organs–on–chips, represented by the human lung, gut and liver chips, have won the 2015 Designs of the Year Awards prize in the best Product design category. The annual awards and museum exhibition by the Design Museum in London recognizes the most innovative, high–impact, and forward–thinking designs from across the world.

"This year's judges were united in their responsibility to award projects that emphasize design's impact on our lives now and in the future. Solving diverse problems with innovation, intelligence and wit, each of these six designs is a worthy winner, " said Gemma Curtin, Curator of Designs of the Year, speaking about the six prize winners representing Product, Architecture, Fashion, Transport, Digital and Graphics design.

Currently in its eighth year, the 2015 Designs of the Year Awards & Exhibition features 76 total nominees across six categories, chosen by the world's top design experts, practitioners, curators and academics. This year's awards will climax next month, in June, when an overall Design of the Year prize will be bestowed upon one of the six selected finalists.

To clinch the Product prize, the Wyss' human organs–on–chips competed against 22 other product designs, including: QardioArm, a discreet personal heart monitor; Project Daniel, a lab that braves hostile war conditions to 3D–print prosthetic arms for children in Sudan; Dragonfly, an asymmetric chair inspired by insects; a DIY gamer kit, which can be a technology learning aid for children; CurrentTable, a table that photosynthesizes electricity; and an air–purifying billboard that turns pollution into clean air.

Learn how human organs–on–chips are designed to mimic human organ–level functions. Credit: Wyss Institute at Harvard University

"As a scientist whose work has been influenced and inspired by art and design from the very beginning of my career, I am greatly honored that organs–on–chips have won this year's Product prize for design, " said Wyss Institute Founding Director Donald E. Ingber, M.D., Ph.D., who invented human organs–on–chips alongside Dan Dongeun Huh, Ph.D., who was a Wyss Technology Development Fellow at the time of its invention. "We are thrilled to know that an international forum of experts who are passionate about the power of design appreciate both the elegance and potential impact of our living organs–on–chips microdevices."

The initial human organ–on–a–chip, designed at the Wyss Institute in 2010 by Ingber and Huh, has since been leveraged for the design of several additional human organs–on–chips. These microdevices have the potential ability to deliver transformative change to human health and pharmaceutical care due to the accuracy with which they emulate human organ–level functions. They stand to significantly reduce the need for animal testing by providing a faster, less expensive, less controversial and much more accurate means to predict whether new drug compounds will be successful in human clinical trials. In 2014, the startup company Emulate, Inc., sprang out of the Wyss Institute in order to commercialize human organs–on–chips.