High-throughput organ-on-a-chip systems: Current status and remaining challenges
Open accessAbstract
Organ-on-a-chip (OoC) systems might be the disruptive technology pharmaceutical industry has been looking for to tackle their ever-increasing R&D costs. First endeavors are well underway to transfer this technology, which was until now used solely in academic settings, to industry. The high hopes of the OoC technology stem inter alia from its potential to merge strengths of animal models and cell culture, i.e., high physiological relevance and high throughput capacity. However, although the predictive value and physiological character of various OoC systems have been highlighted in numerous studies, the applicability for medium or even high-throughput screenings (HTS) has not been demonstrated yet. Adaptations such as massive parallelization and automation are among the biggest challenges in attempts to meet industrial benchmarks of HTS. In this review, we briefly introduce the demands of modern-day HTS in drug discovery and development, review the status-quo of parallelized OoC systems, and discuss the current limitation and remaining challenges that need to be overcome to increase the throughput of OoC experiments.
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Higher throughput across the entire fabrication, culture and analysis pipeline accelerates screening campaigns and increases statistical power.
“Higher throughput across the entire fabrication, culture and analysis pipeline accelerates screening campaigns and increases statistical power (Probst et al., 2018).”
From Mini-hearts for disease modeling and drug testing – process optimization versus biological functionality (2026) · cites this paper as Probst et al., 2018
The hiPSC-based RoC avoids the problem of limited supply and provides the capability to create a multitude of genetically identical systems and sets the foundation for scale-up to higher throughput systems, provided an appropriate framework and automated process landscape is established.
“This not only avoids the problem of limited supply but also provides the capability to create a multitude of genetically identical systems and sets the foundation for a scale-up to higher throughput systems, provided an appropriate framework and an automated process landscape is established (Probst et al., 2018).”
From Merging organoid and organ-on-a-chip technology to generate complex multi-layer tissue models in a human retina-on-a-chip platform (2019) · cites this paper as Probst et al., 2018
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- Authors
- Probst, C., Schneider, S., & Loskill, P.
- Affiliations
- Fraunhofer Institute for Interfacial Engineering and Biotechnology (DE)
- Corresponding author
- Loskill, Peter
- Venue
- Current Opinion in Biomedical Engineering
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2018-06
- Volume
- 6
- Pages
- 33-41
- ISSN
- 2468-4511 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2792993918
- Cited by
- 171
- References
- 50
- Citations by year
- 2026: 17 · 2025: 18 · 2024: 18 · 2023: 18 · 2022: 33 · 2021: 32 · 2020: 14 · 2019: 15 · 2018: 6
- FWCI
- 1.36
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Current Opinion in Biomedical Engineering (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc)
- Publikationsdatenbank der Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft (Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft) (submittedVersion)
- Fraunhofer-Publica (Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft) (submittedVersion)
- Qucosa (Saxon State and University Library Dresden) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- Funders
- Horizon 2020 (766884)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Engineering › Biomedical Engineering › 3D Printing in Biomedical Research
- Physical Sciences › Engineering › Biomedical Engineering › Microfluidic and Capillary Electrophoresis Applications
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Surgery › Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine
- Keywords
- organ-on-a-chip, high-throughput screening, parallelization, automation, drug discovery, drug development, in vitro model, physiological relevance
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