Organ on a Chip Technologies for Disease Models and Safety and Efficacy Testing

Held in conjunction with Organ-on-a-Chip Europe 2016

04 Apr 2016, at 13:30 in Cambridge, UK

The course will provide an overview of the latest advances in organ on a chip and related technologies used for cell culture and the monitoring of cell function. Emphasis will be placed on how these developments might meet the requirements of the pharmaceutical industry and the challenges that have to be met to translate the technologies from research into the routine testing lab. The new technologies will be put into the context of current methods for in-vitro testing of safety and efficacy of chemicals (including drugs) as well as studying disease and more general medical research. Profiles will be given of the major research groups and their strategy for moving towards commercial exploitation and volume manufacture. The course will describe in detail the key technical challenges in creating and maintaining cell culture in a way that mimics the human environment and creates physiologically relevant models that can be more successful in predicting clinical outcomes than the 2D cell culture currently used in high throughput screening.

Learning Objectives:

• Understand the trends and drivers in in vitro cell culture and the role of microfluidics technology.
• Learn about the current state of the art in organ, organoid and tissue culture methods. • Understand different microfabrication methods for low and high volume production and economic aspects relevant to the commercialisation of organ-on-a-chip devices and systems.
• Learn about the importance of media perfusion for cell culture
• Learn about examples of successful applications of connected cell cultures with multiple cell types. • Understand the challenges yet to be solved and the likely timescales for products to reach the market

Topics and Course Organization

• Introduction
• Trends for in-vitro testing: 2D to 3D to co-culture and beyond.
• Approaches to 3D cell culture: scaffolds gels, tissue slices and 3D printing
• Physiologically relevant model: the complexity of the human organism: from cells to system.
• Importance of scale: nano to macro approaches to in-vitro.
• Production techniques for microfluidics and organ on a chip
• Current organ on chip research projects worldwide.
• Successful projects: liver,disease models, cardiotoxicity, blood brain barrier ,cancer.

All Attendees of this Course Receive Electronic Copies of the PowerPoint Presentations from Dr. Davidge and John Alderman. This information will be invaluable for R&D planning and preparation of business plans.