Current State-of-the-Art in Organ-on-a-Chip Technologies

Peter Ertl, Professor of Lab-on-a-Chip Systems, Vienna University of Technology Prof. Ertl holds an engineering degree in Biotechnology (University of Life Sciences, BOKU, Austria), a PhD in Chemistry (University of Waterloo, UW, Canada) and received his postdoctoral training as a biophysicist at University of California at Berkeley (UCB, US). Following a position as Director of Product Development at a UW spin-off venture (Canada), Dr. Ertl joint the Biosensor Technology unit at the Austrian Institute of Technology (AIT). During his tenure at the AIT, Dr. Ertl was also granted a Fulbright Visiting Scholarship at UC Berkeley (2012) and conducted visiting scientist positions at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (2013), the Medical Center of the University of California at San Francisco (2014). In 2016 he was appointed Professor of Lab-on-a-Chip Systems for Bioscience Technologies at the Vienna University of Technology (TUW), where his research focuses on the development of advanced in vitro diagnostic microsystems and organ-on-a-chip systems. Additionally, Dr Ertl held a visiting research appointment at Imperial College London (UK) in 2019 , is speaker of the Austrian Microfluidics Initiative (AMI) and editor of the open access journal Organs-on-a-Chip (Elsevier).
Mario Rothbauer, Principle Investigator, Medical University of Vienna Mario Rothbauer received an MSc. in Biomedical & Tissue Engineering at the University of Applied Sciences Technikum Wien (Vienna, Austria) in 2001 and completed his doctorate in food science and biotechnology in 2015 at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU; Vienna, Austria). At the AIT Austrian Institute of Technology (Vienna, Austria) he worked on the development of lab-on-a-chip systems for cell-based applications that combine cell biology, nanobiotechnology, biosensors and materials science with state-of-the-art microfabrication technologies. As Post-Doc at the CellChipGroup of the Vienna University of Technology (Vienna, Austria) he worked on human barrier-, organ- and multi-organ-on-a-chip as well as human disease models for toxicological and pharmaceutical research with the overall aim to create valid alternatives to animal tests. Since 2019, as PI he develops microphysiological systems for musculoskeletal diseases at the Karl Chiari Lab for Orthopaedic Biology at the Department of Orthopedics and Trauma Surgery of the Medical University of Vienna (Vienna, Austria) with a thematic focus on rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis.