Approaching the in vitro clinical trial: engineering organs on chips

In vitro cell culture and animal models are the most heavily relied upon tools of the pharmaceutical industry. When these tools fail, the results are costly and have at times, proven deadly. One promising new tool to enhance preclinical development of drugs is Organs on Chips (OOCs), proposed as a clinically and physiologically relevant means of modeling health and disease. Bringing the patient from bedside to bench in this form requires that the design, build, and test of OOCs be founded in clinical observations and methods. By creating OOCs as models of the patient, the industry may be better positioned to evaluate medicinal therapeutics.