Versatile Organ-on-a-Chip Devices

Dear Colleagues,

It is our pleasure to announce a forthcoming Special Issue of the MDPI journal Micromachines, entitled “Versatile Organ-on-a-Chip Devices.”

The tremendous success of microelectronics at the end of the 20th century, often symbolized by “Moore’s law,” is based on miniaturization of the active and passive elements of electronic circuits. Improving the methods of the underlying micro- and nanofabrication technique, lithography actually paved the way to the development of various “lab-on-a-chip” (LOC) applications, which complement microelectronics by miniature fluidic, mechanical, and/or optical elements. Since biological cells and their 2-D or 3-D cultures, organoids (miniature organ models), can be easily accommodated by LOC structures, it was only a question of time when this trend reached biological and medical science. Miniature organ models of brain, heart, lung, muscle, blood vessels, liver, and skin have been created during the past 10 years to model and study cellular and molecular interactions and pathological conditions of these organs. Predictably such “organs-on-a-chip” will increasingly represent a cornerstone of translational medicine in the forthcoming decades, and may complement, or in many cases substitute, animal studies in modeling diseases. Given the complexity of the human body, however, such disease models should also include the interaction of organs with each other (e.g., gut epithelium, microbiome, blood-brain barrier, brain for the “gut-brain axis,” etc.). The goal of this Special Issue is to facilitate the solution of this task by giving an overview of various existing approaches for versatile organ-on-a-chip models, and stimulating cooperation among experts of different areas.

Accordingly, we invite regular research papers and review articles that focus on novel methodological developments related to organ-on-a-chip technologies, and/or their utilizations in basic or applied sciences.

We are looking forward to receiving your submissions!

With best wishes,

Prof. Dr. András Dér
Dr. Sándor Valkai
Dr. Fruzsina Walter
Dr. András Kincses
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Micromachines is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2100 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.