Design of a Liver-on-a-Chip

Abstract

An organ-on-a-chip is a microscale rigid plate (therefore, called a chip) containing the specialized cells of a given tissue and a fluid line flowing in and out. In a chip, single or multiple cell types attach on a very small area, while the fluidic flow passes the cells via a tiny channel. Given the fluidic flow, the organ-on-a-chip allows the cells to have a dynamic interaction with external stimuli (e.g., adjacent or distal cells and a gradient concentration of bioactive molecules). In contrast to the static setting of an organoid, the organ-on-a-chip is more physiologically relevant to human organs. Nowadays, several types of the organ-on-a-chip have been established, including the liver (Lee et al. 2007; Ma et al. 2018), lung (Huh et al. 2010), kidney (Jang and Suh 2010), heart (Marsano et al. 2016), intestine (Kim et al. 2012), or multiple organs (Satoh et al. 2017). A few studies demonstrate the utility of LOCs in personalized medicine (Raimondi et al. 2020; Sachs et al. 2018), in which the one-size-fit-to-all models of the 2D culture systems will be replaced in the near future by tailor-made LOCs.