Microengineered Physiological Systems for Disease Modeling and Drug Testing

Dear Colleagues,

Reconstituting organ-level functions on chips is an emerging field in an attempt to create physiologically relevant environments in microscale devices and mimic the structure, function, and resulting physiology of human organs. Microphysiological systems (also termed organ-on-a-chip) is a 3D microfluidic cell culture system that represents key functional units of living human organs and simulates the physiological response for better predictive drug development and mechanistic disease modeling. The use of human cells to recapitulate the chemical and mechanical microenvironments within human organs and simulate the critical aspects will facilitate the examination of the interaction of drugs or multifunctional nanomaterials with biologically relevant microenvironments and ultimately contribute to rapid clinical translation of drugs, thereby bringing drugs to market more quickly and perhaps even eliminating the need for animal testing. This Special Issue of Micromachines aims at reviewing the current state-of-the-art and presenting perspectives of further development. Contributions related to organ-on-a-chip approaches reproducing tissue interface barriers, building tissue-level organization of parenchymal cells, and modeling systematic interactions of organs with functional scaling are welcome. Efforts to build advanced organ-on-a-chip technologies, including development of advanced biomaterials for 3D scaffolds, spatiotemporal regulation of 3D cellular environments, combination of in vitro and ex vivo experimental test-beds, and integrative approaches for organ–organ interactions will also be welcome. Finally, advanced studies on the applications of organ-on-a-chip technologies for drug screening and nanomedicine development are highly encouraged for submission.

Dr. YongTae Kim
Guest Editor

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