State Key Laboratory of Bioelectronics, Southeast University, Nanjing, 210096, China.
Small. 2016 May;12(17):2253-82. doi: 10.1002/smll.201503208. Epub 2016 Feb 22.
"Organ-on-a-chip" systems integrate microengineering, microfluidic technologies, and biomimetic principles to create key aspects of living organs faithfully, including critical microarchitecture, spatiotemporal cell-cell interactions, and extracellular microenvironments. This creative platform and its multiorgan integration recapitulating organ-level structures and functions can bring unprecedented benefits to a diversity of applications, such as developing human in vitro models for healthy or diseased organs, enabling the investigation of fundamental mechanisms in disease etiology and organogenesis, benefiting drug development in toxicity screening and target discovery, and potentially serving as replacements for animal testing. Recent advances in novel designs and examples for developing organ-on-a-chip platforms are reviewed. The potential for using this emerging technology in understanding human physiology including mechanical, chemical, and electrical signals with precise spatiotemporal controls are discussed. The current challenges and future directions that need to be pursued for these proof-of-concept studies are also be highlighted.
“器官芯片”系统集成了微工程、微流控技术和仿生学原理，忠实地创建了活器官的关键方面，包括关键的微观结构、时空细胞-细胞相互作用和细胞外微环境。这个创造性的平台及其多器官集成再现了器官水平的结构和功能，可以为多种应用带来前所未有的好处，例如为健康或患病器官开发人类体外模型，使疾病病因和器官发生的基本机制的研究成为可能，有益于药物开发中的毒性筛选和靶点发现，并有可能替代动物试验。本文综述了新型设计和开发器官芯片平台的实例。讨论了利用这项新兴技术理解人类生理学的潜力，包括机械、化学和电信号的精确时空控制。还强调了这些概念验证研究需要解决的当前挑战和未来方向。
