Microphysiological Systems: gold standard approach towards in vitro biomimetics and its potential to drive forward the fisheries sector to the next level

Abstract

High attrition rates of drug candidates in clinical trials are caused owing to the utilization of traditional cell culture and experimental animal models for preclinical drug screening. Besides, major bottlenecks affecting the crude pipeline of drug development process are time and cost involved. It takes nearly 13 to 15 years for an efficient drug to reach the market and the cost of breeding, housing and, later on disposing the experimental animal models, is extravagant. Differences between human and animal physiological conditions and signaling mechanisms compromise the drug efficiency testing protocol resulting in clinical trial failure. In this scenario, 2-D culture systems stole the limelight providing a platform for reducing drug discovery and development pipeline shortcomings, but failed in the long run. Subsequently, alternating strategy to overcome such bottlenecks has recently emerged in the name of Microphysiological Systems. These hold great potential to act as surrogates by virtue of their biomimetic attribute in providing accurate prediction of drug effects through physiologically relevant organ-organ interactions. The far reaching applications of microphysiological systems in the fields of toxicology, medicine, disease modeling and so on, have major implications in fisheries sector as well, leading to the in vivo modeling of two renowned fish models, zebrafish and rainbow trout, as microphysiological systems. This mini review has described different types of microphysiological systems and shed light on their immediate need in the present scenario. For the first time, current advances and applications in context to the field of fisheries have also been discussed stating that this new age technology has the potential to open new avenues to researchers, experts and scientists in fisheries sector in the ensuing years.