Abstract

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.