Thousands of Diseases. Only 500 Treatments.

3D Animation and Scientific Visualization  |  National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), National Institutes of Health

The Challenge

Thousands of diseases affect humans. Only about 500 have any treatment.

The pipeline from laboratory discovery to approved therapy is one of the most expensive and least efficient processes in modern science. Current drug development takes too long, costs too much, and fails at a staggering rate: roughly 95 percent of new therapies never make it past clinical trials. The core problem is that the models researchers rely on in early testing, cell cultures, and animal studies, often do not predict how a drug will behave in the human body.

NCATS, the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences at the National Institutes of Health, needed a way to communicate the science behind a potential solution: bioengineered devices called tissue chips, designed to mimic the function of human organs and, ultimately, the human body itself. The science was compelling. Making it visible to a broad audience required a different kind of expertise.

The Work

V! Studios produced a 3.5-minute scientific visualization for the NCATS Tissue Chip for Drug Screening Program, a collaboration among NIH, DARPA, the FDA, and researchers nationwide. The animation translates the biology and engineering of tissue chip technology into clear, accurate, broadcast-quality visuals.

The challenge was not simply to animate a process. It was to make an unfamiliar concept intuitive to a non-specialist audience, without sacrificing scientific precision.

What we animated:

The current state of drug development is visualized as a pipeline to show where and how most candidate therapies fail before reaching patients. The structural design of a tissue chip: flexible plastic architecture with ports and microchannels allowing nutrients and oxygen to flow through living tissue grown directly on the device. A liver chip in detail, showing multiple cell types organized to replicate the spatial arrangement found in the human liver, with fluid dynamics modeled to simulate real physiological conditions. A full-body system, connecting individual organ chips into an integrated network representing the whole-body drug response. The expanded research applications of tissue chip technology include personalized medicine, environmental toxin testing, and disease modeling for cancer and rare diseases.

Every visual was built to support narration grounded in the program’s actual science, not to illustrate a concept in the abstract. The animation distinguishes between what current models can tell researchers and what tissue chips make possible, showing the difference between a static cell culture and a device that replicates the mechanical forces, flow, and cell organization of living human tissue.

Why It Matters

Tissue chips represent a fundamental shift in how drug safety and efficacy can be evaluated before a single human subject is enrolled in a clinical trial. If the technology delivers on its promise, it could compress development timelines, reduce the cost of discovering what does not work, and enable modeling of individual patient biology in ways that static cell cultures and animal studies cannot.

That story requires more than a published paper or a press release to reach the audiences who need to understand it: the public, policymakers, educators, and the next generation of scientists. It requires visualization.

If it can be understood, we can show it. If it can be shown, it can change minds.

The Team

This project was executed by V! Studios’ 3D animation and scientific visualization team, the same team that has produced 324 ScienceCasts for NASA since 2011 and created forensic 3D animations for federal accident investigations used in congressional testimony and regulatory proceedings. The team brings the same standard to a three-minute educational video as to an animation that will be seen by a congressional subcommittee: scientific accuracy, visual clarity, and no shortcuts.

Client

National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), National Institutes of Health

Discipline

Science, Made Visible: 3D Animation and Scientific Visualization