Progress and Future Prospectives in Skin-on-Chip Development with Emphasis on the use of Different Cell Types and Technical Challenges

Abstract

Understanding the healthy and diseased state of skin is important in many areas of basic and applied research. Although the field of skin tissue engineering has advanced greatly over the last years, current in vitro skin models still do not mimic the complexity of the human skin. Skin-on-chip and induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) might be key technologies to improve in vitro skin models. This review summarizes the state of the art of in vitro skin models with regard to cell sources (primary, cell line, iPSC) and microfluidic devices. It can be concluded that iPSC have the potential to be differentiated into many kinds of immunologically matched cells and skin-on-chip technology might lead to more physiologically relevant skin models due to the controlled environment, possible exchange of immune cells, and an increased barrier function. Therefore the combination of iPSC and skin-on-chip is expected to lead to superior healthy and diseased in vitro skin models.

Keywords: Cell line; In vitro; Induced pluripotent stem cell; Microfluidics; Organ-on-chip; Organotypic model; Skin; Skin equivalent; Skin model.

Fig. 1

The combination of a microfluidic device (migration and immigration of immune cells and controlled environment) and iPSCs (all skin cells eg. fibroblasts, keratinocytes, melanocytes, dermal papillae cells, endothelial cells, adipocytes from same iPSC donor so no rejection) form the basis for the next generation skin models. Such an immunocompetent in vivo-like skin model containing three skin layers (epidermis, dermis and adipose tissue) and appendages would be an alternative to animal testing in toxicology assessment and drug testing