Artificial tissues are essential to disease modeling, drug safety, and human efficacy testing. Using several created tissues that can physiologically connect to represent body functions and systemic disorders has proven difficult.
A plug-and-play multi-organ chip that can be personalized for the patient has recently been developed by researchers, which can answer all these issues.
Researchers claim to have created a multi-organ chip that mimics the functioning of multiple interdependent human organs. The chip comprises an engineered combination of heart, bone, liver, and skin. These components are connected through a network of blood vessels allowing immune cells to circulate within. The researchers have developed the organ plug-and-play chip, which’s about the size of a microscope slide and can be tailored to meet patient requirements. Scientists have spent ten years conducting hundreds of experiments, investigating countless brilliant concepts, and creating numerous prototypes. They have now created a framework that effectively captures the biology of internal organ interactions. The researchers have created a tissue chip system that mimics the communication between organs in the body. They connected heart, liver, bone, and skin tissue modules through a recirculating flow. The researchers chose these tissues to thoroughly test the suggested methodology since they have distinctly different embryonic origins and structural and functional characteristics and are negatively impacted by cancer treatment medicines. To emulate how human organs are connected within the body, they decided to connect the tissues by vascular circulation while keeping each specific tissue niche required to maintain its biological fidelity. The research team is currently utilizing versions of this chip to study the safety and effectiveness of medicines well as the spread of breast and prostate cancers, leukemia, the impact of radiation on human tissues, the effects of SARS-CoV-2, on the heart, lungs, and blood vessels and the consequences of heart and brain ischemia.
For further biological and medical research, the group is also creating an easy-to-use, standardized chip for academic and clinical laboratories.
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Reference : [1] – “A multi-organ chip with matured tissue niches linked by vascular flow | Nature Biomedical Engineering” . Accessed August 08, 2023. Link . 
