Multi-Organ Chip System Could Help Devise Therapies for Disease

Human organ-on-a-chip systems currently represent promising tools for drug screening in vitro. However, to deepen our understanding of human physiology and test new drugs for human diseases, it will be important to connect multiple organ-on-chip systems, in order to better simulate the physiology of the human body in vitro. Importantly, these multi-organ chips should be customizable and flexible, considering that different cell cultures (e.g., cardiac cells, liver cells, and neurons) normally require different culture conditions. Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley recently developed a customizable Lego®-like plug-and-play system, called μOrgano, which allows the possibility to culture single organ-on-a-chips and to connect them to create multi-organ-chip systems, as shown by culturing human induced pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes.