What Do We Need to Make Microphysiological Systems Drug Assays Massively Parallel?
John Wikswo,
A.B. Learned Professor of Living State Physics; Founding Director, Vanderbilt Institute for Integrative Biosystems,
Vanderbilt University
Organs-on-chips, organoids and coupled microphysiological systems (MPS)
will never reach the level of automation possible with single-pass, high
throughput screening of million-compound drug libraries using robots
for acoustic seeding, feeding, and dosing-of cells or spheroids in 1536
well plates, followed by either end-point imaging or acoustic delivery
of media to a mass spectrometer. Nor should they. But one can wonder
exactly how many MPS devices could be created, maintained, and analyzed
by an appropriate robotic perfusion system. We will describe a
convergence of microfluidic, robotic, and analytic technologies that
could easily service a thousand organ-chips or 10,000 separate organoids
in a 42U telecom rack/incubator, each undergoing different
pharmacokinetic exposures and dynamic metabolomic readouts.
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