Integrating Organs-on-Chips: Multiplexing, Scaling, Vascularization, and Innervation

Abstract

Organs-on-chips (OoCs) have attracted significant attention because they can be designed to mimic in vivo environments. Beyond constructing a single OoC, recent efforts have tried to integrate multiple OoCs to broaden potential applications such as disease modeling and drug discoveries. However, various challenges remain for integrating OoCs towards in vivo-like operation, such as incorporating various connections for integrating multiple OoCs. We review multiplexed OoCs and challenges they face: scaling, vascularization, and innervation. In our opinion, future OoCs will be constructed to have increased predictive power for in vivo phenomena and will ultimately become a mainstream tool for high quality biomedical and pharmaceutical research.

Keywords: innervation-on-a-chip; integrated organ-on-a-chip; multiplexing; organ-on-chip; scaling rules; vascularization-on-a-chip.