Organs-on-chips: how we build better lab rats

Biomedical and pharmaceutical research continue to rely on lab rats, or cells growing in petri dishes. Both of these fall well short of capturing the true situation inside our own bodies. I will discuss how we can use micro-engineering to build so-called organs-on-chips, where we attempt to better recreate the human situation by precisely arranging cells, tuning the properties of the construction materials around them, and exposing them to liquid flow. I will further highlight how we can use integrated sensors to gain deeper insight into these organs-on-chips. Ultimately, this combination of microtechnology and biology paves the way towards more ethical and more predictive laboratory models to understand disease and develop new drugs.