Towards establishing human body-on-a-chip systems

Abstract

Body-on-a-chip (BoC) platforms are established from multiple organs-on-chips (OoCs) to recapitulate the interactions between different tissues. Recently, Vunjak-Novakovic and colleagues reported the creation of a BoC system comprising four fluidically linked OoCs. Herein, the major innovations in their BoC system are discussed, followed by our future perspectives on enhancing the physiological relevance and scalability of BoCs for applications in studying disease mechanisms, testing potential therapeutics, and developing personalized medicine.

Keywords: Body-on-a-chip; Disease modelling; Drug testing; Microfluidic device; Organ-on-a-chip; Patient-on-a-chip; Precision medicine; Stem cell.

Fig. 1

Representative BoC systems and future perspectives. (A) The BoC system created by Vunjak-Novakovic and colleagues: schematic of tissue components (left), the cell types utilized (middle), and validation and applications of the chip (right) [1]. NHDF: normal human dermal fibroblast; MSC: mesenchymal stromal cell; HUVEC: human umbilical venous endothelial cell. (B) A modular design approach to creating a representative six-organ BoC characterized by the sharing of a common “blood substitute”. The vascular channel is separated from the organ mimics by an endothelial barrier. (C) The application of iPSCs to generate patient-specific BoCs for personalized drug screening. By complementing the traditional drug development pipeline (conventional in vitro assays not shown) with personalized BoCs (from route ➀ route ➁), the ineffective and/or unsafe drugs for specific patients can “fail fast and fail early”, thus improving treatment outcomes at reduced costs. (D) Key considerations and technical challenges in establishing BoC systems