Monolithic integration of silicon and polymer microstructures for Organ-on-Chip applications

Drug development is a complex, time-consuming (10 - 15 years) and expensive process. For a new medicine to reach the market, the net expenses covered by the pharmaceutical industry have been estimated to be around $2.6 billion. Nevertheless, the risk of finding adverse effects or toxicity cases once the drug is already on the market is still...

Metal and Polymeric Strain Gauges for Si-based, Monolithically Fabricated Organs-on-Chips

Organ-on-chip (OOC) is becoming the alternative tool to conventional in vitro screening. Heart-on-chip devices including microstructures for mechanical and electrical stimulation have been demonstrated to be advantageous to study structural organization and maturation of heart cells. This paper presents the development of metal and polymeric...

Cytostretch, an Organ-on-Chip Platform

Organ-on-Chips (OOCs) are micro-fabricated devices which are used to culture cells in order to mimic functional units of human organs. The devices are designed to simulate the physiological environment of tissues in vivo. Cells in some types of OOCs can be stimulated in situ by electrical and/or mechanical actuators. These actuations can mimic...

PEDOT:PSS: A Conductive and Flexible Polymer for Sensor Integration in Organ-on-Chip Platforms

Sensing and stimulating microstructures are necessary to develop more specialized and highly accurate Organ-on-Chip (OOC) platforms. In this paper, we present the integration of a conductive polymer, poly (3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) polystyrene sulfonate (PEDOT:PSS), on a stretchable membrane, core element of an Heart-on-Chip. The electrical...