title: Organ-on-a-Chip Systems: Microengineering to Biomimic Living Systems.
abstract: "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.
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Bioelectronics, Southeast University, Nanjing, 210096, China.
authors.forename: Fuyin
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Zheng
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Bioelectronics, Southeast University, Nanjing, 210096, China.
authors.forename: Fanfan
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Fu
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Bioelectronics, Southeast University, Nanjing, 210096, China.
authors.forename: Yao
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Cheng
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Bioelectronics, Southeast University, Nanjing, 210096, China.
authors.forename: Chunyan
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Bioelectronics, Southeast University, Nanjing, 210096, China.
authors.forename: Yuanjin
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Zhao
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Bioelectronics, Southeast University, Nanjing, 210096, China.
authors.forename: Zhongze
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Gu
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001187:Artificial Organs; D001698:Biomedical Engineering; D032701:Biomimetics; D001812:Blood-Brain Barrier; D002463:Cell Membrane Permeability; D006801:Humans; D046210:Microfluidic Analytical Techniques / Q000295:instrumentation*; D008954:Models, Biological
keywords: biomaterials; biomimics; human-on-a chip; microfluidics; organ-on-a-chip