Abstract
Organs-on-chip are gaining increasing attention as promising platforms for drug screening and testing applications. However, lymph nodes-on-chip options remain limited although the lymph node is one of the main determinants of the immunotoxicity of newly developed pharmacological drugs. In this review, we describe existing biomimetic lymph nodes-on-chip, their design, and their physiological relevance to pharmacology and shed the light on future directions associated with lymph node-on-chip design and implementation in drug discovery and development.
Highlights
Organs-on-chip have recently emerged as powerful screening tools in the field of pharmacology and toxicology (Maharjan et al, 2020)
We describe the human native lymph node, summarize existing biomimetic lymph nodes-on-chip, their design, and their physiological relevance to pharmacology and shed the light on future directions associated with lymph nodeon-chip design and implementation in drug discovery and development
Active pumping often induces cellular cross-talk by the transport of chemokines or cell markers (Parlato et al, 2017; Polini et al, 2019; Shim et al, 2019). Another important aspect in the design of a biomimetic lymph node is its ability to support the co-culture and spatial distribution of the different cell types that populate this organ in a similar way to how they are organized in the human model
Summary
Organs-on-chip have recently emerged as powerful screening tools in the field of pharmacology and toxicology (Maharjan et al, 2020) Such chips enable more accurate evaluation of the safety and efficacy of investigational drugs compared to traditional tissue culture plates and animal models (Low et al, 2020). Organs-on-chip are perfused microfluidic chips composed of micro-sized channels wherein cells of a single type or more are allowed to grow and expand in an in vivo like microenvironment They are not intended to construct whole living organs but instead to build the functional units of the organs that are capable of replicating specific aspects of human physiology in vitro (Richardson et al, 2020). We describe the human native lymph node, summarize existing biomimetic lymph nodes-on-chip, their design, and their physiological relevance to pharmacology and shed the light on future directions associated with lymph nodeon-chip design and implementation in drug discovery and development
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