Recent developments of Organ-on-a-Chip platforms: A mini review

Organ-on-a-chip (OOAC) is a cutting-edge technology and refers to a microengineered biomimetic system based on microfluidic chip and in vitro cell culture. The numerous advantages of this technology over conventional platforms make it highly popular in the healthcare industry. OOAC permits the study of human physiology in an organ-specific context. Such platforms can generate responses similar to those observed in vivo which enable development of novel in vitro disease models, and could potentially serve as replacements for animals used in drug development and toxin testing. For data collection, articles containing one of the words “Organ-on-a-chip”, “Microfluidic chip” and “Physiological model”, were searched and studied in Thomson Reuters, PubMed, Scopus and Science databases. Biomimetic microsystems representing different organs can be integrated into a single microdevice and linked by a microfluidic circulatory system in a physiologically relevant manner to model a complex, dynamic process of drug absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion, evaluate drug efficacy and toxicity. Several tissues have been used so far such as liver, lung, kidney, gut, bone, breast, brain and heart. Reports show that microfluidic chips have a good similarity in the function with real organs in vivo therefore these tools were suitable for simulation of organs and drugs screening in laboratories.