Multiorgan tissue on chip for wellness: Food, Safety, Environment and Cosmetics

Organs-on-chips (OoCs) have emerged as the new frontier in HTS technology, in drug assessment and development, and in nutraceutics, and cosmeceutics identification. OoCs hold the potential to reduce animal testing and provide realistic in vitro assays. However, while sophisticated microdevices have been designed, the realization of tissue engineered constructs on chip is still poor. The use of exogenous materials as cell scaffolding along with a poor control of microenvironmental condition at single cell level, strongly limit OoC robustness. Indeed, culturing cells in exogenous 3D scaffolds does not recapitulate human tissue context, since regulatory/instructive and repository roles of the native extracellular matrix are missing. The lesson reports our recent results on OoC devices designed considering – above all – the deputed function the organ carries out in the in vivo context. Furthermore, the lecture underlines the implications of the OoC capability to assess therapeutic and diagnostic approach on human function.