Abstract
Organ-on-a-chip (OoC), also known as micro physiological systems or “tissue chips” have attracted substantial interest in recent years due to their numerous applications, especially in precision medicine, drug development and screening. Organ-on-a-chip devices can replicate key aspects of human physiology, providing insights into the studied organ function and disease pathophysiology. Moreover, these can accurately be used in drug discovery for personalized medicine. These devices present useful substitutes to traditional preclinical cell culture methods and can reduce the use of in vivo animal studies. In the last few years OoC design technology has seen dramatic advances, leading to a wide range of biomedical applications. These advances have also revealed not only new challenges but also new opportunities. There is a need for multidisciplinary knowledge from the biomedical and engineering fields to understand and realize OoCs. The present review provides a snapshot of this fast-evolving technology, discusses current applications and highlights advantages and disadvantages for biomedical approaches.
Highlights
In their natural cells are surrounded by a network called Extracellular Matrix (ECM)
The applications range from disease studying to drug testing considering the complex environmental interaction among different cell types
In the present times single-organ-on-achip models have already been created for almost all organs, with some studies on multiple OoC devices interconnected (Goldstein et al, 2021)
Summary
Organ-on-chip (OoC) is a concept with great interest all around the globe, due to the importance of their applications in biomedical field. OoC has several applications, but the most important is drug development and the effects that they have on different organs. Drugs are mostly tested on animals, which in some cases give inaccurate data or raise ethical concerns from organizations such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animal (PETA), but it is considered an important step in tumor research (Mattei et al, 2021). This led to researchers searching for new ways to allow testing on human cells (Wikswo et al, 2013; Marx, 2016; Zheng et al, 2016; Kodzius et al, 2017; Jusoh et al, 2019). The advantages and disadvantages of OoC will be presented and the structure
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