Abstract

Integrating Microfluidics and Tissue Engineering for Organ-on-a-Chip Applications

Kennedy Okeyo, Senior Lecturer, Institute for Frontier Life and Medical Sciences, Kyoto University

Organ-on-a-chip continues to attract a great deal of attention owing to their potential application in drug development, disease modeling and basic biological studies. For these applications, it is important to develop realistic on-chip organ models which recapitulates tissue-specific, differentiated functions of many cell types for accurate prediction of in vivo tissue functions and drug activities. This talk will introduce our strategy of combining microfluidics and tissue engineering approaches toward fabrication of tissue/organ models in which several cell types are in direct interaction, hence enabling the realization of tissue-level cell-cell interaction, which is important for recapitulating in vivo tissue functions. We will also highlight recent progress in step-by-step fabrication of higher-order tissue models achieved by the mesh culture technique, and on-going integration with microfluidics to enable disease modeling and, potentially, drug activity monitoring.