The Organ-on-Chip Technology

The recent advancements in tissue engineering and stem cell biology have revolutionized the biomedical research and allowed the scientific community to push the boundary of the in vitro systems to become closer to patients and, to some extent, personalized models (1,2).

Among the others, the Organ-on-Chip technology enables creation of multicellular co-culture systems characterized by the presence of tissue-specific substrates (extracellular matrix) and physiologically relevant 3D geometries. Differently than in classic-static models, cell growing within these chips are exposed to physiologically relevant biomechanical forces (3,4).

The unique ability of the Organ-on-Chip technology of mimicking the dynamic microenvironment of animal tissues, makes this system an excellent platform for studying of hemodynamic forces that influence organ-function in healthy and disease states (5–7).

References

  1. Fong, E. L. S., Toh, T. B., Yu, H. & Chow, E. K.-H. 3D Culture as a Clinically Relevant Model for Personalized Medicine. SLAS Technol. Transl. Life Sci. Innov. 22, 245–253 (2017).
  2.  van den Berg, A., Mummery, C. L., Passier, R. & van der Meer, A. D. Personalised organs-on-chips: functional testing for precision medicine. Lab. Chip 19, 198–205 (2019).
  3. Ingber, D. E. Developmentally inspired human ‘organs on chips’. Development 145, dev156125 (2018).
  4. Nawroth, J. C. et al. Stem cell-based Lung-on-Chips: The best of both worlds? Adv. Drug Deliv. Rev. 140, 12–32 (2019).
  5. Jain, A. et al. Primary Human Lung Alveolus-on-a-chip Model of Intravascular Thrombosis for Assessment of Therapeutics. Clin. Pharmacol. Ther. 103, 332–340 (2018).
  6. Barrile, R. et al. Organ-on-Chip Recapitulates Thrombosis Induced by an anti-CD154 Monoclonal Antibody: Translational Potential of Advanced Microengineered Systems. Clin. Pharmacol. Ther. 104, 1240–1248 (2018).
  7. Vatine, G. D. et al. Human iPSC-Derived Blood-Brain Barrier Chips Enable Disease Modeling and Personalized Medicine Applications. Cell Stem Cell 24, 995-1005.e6 (2019).