Characterization and Processing of Elastomers for Organ-on-Chip Applications

The current standard for organ-on-chip substrate materials is polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS). PDMS has many beneficial properties such as biocompatibility, transparency, elasticity, and easy prototyping. The main disadvantages of PDMS are its hydrophobicity (reducing cell attachment and cell proliferation), quick hydrophobic recovery (within a few...

Low-cost Benchtop Equipment and Procedures for Organ-on-Chip Prototyping

The Organ on Chip (OoC) market is fast-growing and has the promise to drastically reduce the cost of developing drugs and the need for animal testing. However, the growth could be obstructed by the difficulties of scaling up production of developed prototypes. Most OoC prototypes are not suited for mass production because of the material used,...

Low-Impedance PEDOT:PSS MEA Integrated in a Stretchable Organ-on-Chip Device

We present the first Organ-on-Chip equipped with a low-impedance Poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) polystyrene sulfonate (PEDOT:PSS) MicroElectrode Array (MEA). The novel device allows simultaneous mechanical stimulation with a stretchable PDMS membrane and electrical monitoring via the PEDOT:PSS MEA of multiple in vitro cell cultures. The...

Design and Fabrication of a Dielectric Elastomer Actuator for Organ-on-Chips Platforms

Cell behavior in vitro can be regulated by mechanical stimulation. Cytostretch is an Organ-on-Chip (OOC) platform that allows cyclic stretching tissue in culture. Its pneumatic actuation can hinder it from microfluidic systems integration. A dielectric elastomer actuator (DEA) was developed and fabricated in this thesis for Cytostretch as an...

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...

A CMOS process compatible charge-modulated FGFET based ion sensor for integration into Organ-on-Chip platforms

Drug development is an entire area of research that partly exploits the developments from biomedical research. Understanding the diseases that affect humanity fatally is critical to our existence. Researchers have studied various molecules and genetic compounds that are responsible for the proliferation of these diseases in the human body. For...

Polymer Microfabrication Modules for Cytostretch Organ-on-chip Applications

The use of conventional biological assay tools, such as Petri dish, has hindered the drug discovery studies ineffective and time-consuming. To cope with this problem, organ-on-chip (OOC) devices have been developed. Modeling organ functionality, topography, and pathology, OOC devices are expected to pave the way the drug discovery processes....

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...

Fabrication and characterization of an Upside-down CNT MEA

Over the last few years the need of new alternatives to traditional disease modelling, drug screening and toxicity tests has boosted the development of a new class of devices called Organ on Chip. These usually consist in a substrate or a well in which cells are cultured with the aim of differentiating them in a particular tissue lineage. With...

Fabrication of a microporous PDMS membrane for an Organ-on-Chip device

Organs on chips are a novel set of devices whose aim is to mimic cellular in-vivo conditions of the human physiology within a microchip. The need of reliable disease models, particularly for the development of pharmaceutical drugs, has drawn increased attention as the current widespread models; static cell cultures and animal tests, have proven...

Assessment of Cytostretch - A Heart-On-Chip device. Experiments on Cardiomyocytes

An organ-on-chip device, called Cytostretch (Philips NV), that is capable of mechanically stimulating cultured cells, is the subject of this study. The device comprises a microthin PolyDiMethylSiloxane membrane that is highly elastic, on which titanium nitride electrodes have been embedded. Its utility is projected in cardiac research to emulate...

Design of Cytostretch Skin A human cell based stretchable, flexible and mass-producible skin tissue model for drug development

In the near future, human cell based Organ-on-Chip models are likely to replace animal experimentation during the development of new drugs. Not only is animal testing associated with ethical issues, but human cell based models can also give a more accurate representation of the human physiology, resulting in more reliable results of drug...