With the advancement in the semiconductor technology it is possible to fabricate billions of transistors in a single integrated circuit (IC) of size approximately 5 cm ². This has made it possible to have entire electronic/embedded system on a single IC or a chip and the popular term for this is ‘System on a chip’ or SoC. Typical SoC has processor, memory, input/output interfaces, peripherals, communication interfaces and lot more on a single chip.

Similarly a SoC that has several laboratory functions integrated on a single chip is called ‘lab on a chip’. Lab on chip concept has revolutionized the field of medicine. Such devices are subset of MEMS (micro electrical mechanical systems) devices and are also referred to as “Micro total analysis systems”. Micro medical devices with movable parts and drug holders play a crucial role in the treatment of various challenging health conditions in the modern medicine. One extension to this concept is ‘Organ-on-chip’.

This new organ-on-chip approach is also called micro-physiological system and is capable of matching the properties of diseases. These are not meant to be inserted into human body as implants but rather they are intended for scientific research to promote development of new drugs. These have an additional advantage of being transparent thereby allowing an insight into the inner working of our organs. Structure and function of native tissues are imitated and these have been developed for human organs like lungs, heart, tongue and intestines.

3D Printed Heart on a chip.

3D culture systems are more popular as the ECM gel can accommodate shape changes which are not possible by rigid 2D culture. One such example is Heart-on-chip that can collect data like beating capability and strength of organ. It is a 3D printed device with built in sensors to measure contractile strength of the tissue. It is built by a fully automated digital manufacturing procedure which is quick and easy to customize. This approach has opened new avenues for in vitro tissue engineering, toxicology and drug screening research. However their fabrication is expensive and currently such devices are built in clean rooms using a complex multistep lithographic process. Further data acquisition process for organ on chip is laborious and requires microscopy or high speed cameras.

Innumerable animal lives are lost and process even fails to predict human response as traditional animal models do not accurately mimic human patho-physiology. This also takes years to complete and costs billion of dollars. But human organ on chip can change this by replicating the configuration, structure and functions of living organs and further, it can even replace animal testing in future. It can also revolutionize the toxicology and various development processes of pharmaceuticals and other cosmetics that are dependent on animal testing.

- By:- Anshu Sharma – Asst. Prof. Department of ECE, Chitkara University H.P.

References:

• https://wyss.harvard.edu/