Skin-on-a-chip model for drug treatment study

Abstract

Overcoming the challenges that the pharmaceutical industry currently faces, such as ethical and regulatory issues, and the considerable difference between the animal and human organism, requires the development of more sophisticated models of the human body. Organ-on-a-chip technologies has arisen as a new enabling platform for organ modeling and drug screening based on bioinspired microfluidic systems. These devices have the potential to mimic the complex tissue architectures and organ-level interactions that dominate the systemic response to a drug. The present project describes a proposal of design, modeling, fabrication and testing a skin-on-a-chip device to replacing animal tests by assays in a 3D and dynamic system, made up of human cells, efficient to the point of mimicking in a more realistic way the interactions between human skin and agents with cytotoxic potential. The skin-on-a-chip proposed could be capable of accommodating a bioengineered skin equivalent continuously perfused through a microvascular channel, thus providing a solid proof of concept of the feasibility of a skin-modeling device for drug screening.