Human organ-on-a-chip technology as a catalyst for drug discovery

The pharmaceutical industry currently faces a critical attrition crisis, with approximately 90% of drug candidates failing during clinical translation. A major contributor to this high failure rate is the inability of preclinical models, namely conventional cell cultures and animal studies, to accurately predict human responses. In recent years, human Organ-on-a-Chip (Organ Chip) microfluidic culture technology has emerged as an alternative and potentially transformative approach to overcome these limitations. Unlike static cell cultures or organoids, Organ Chips recapitulate organ-level pathophysiology by incorporating tissue-tissue interfaces, dynamic fluid flow, mechanical cues, and immune cells, enabling a higher level of physiological mimicry as well as the testing of therapeutic responses using clinically relevant drug pharmacokinetic profiles. In this article, we focus on how human Organ Chip technology has begun to be used to facilitate drug development, its advantages and disadvantages relative to traditional preclinical models, and its recent integration with artificial intelligence (AI) and high throughput screens, which have the potential to accelerate discovery while ameliorating translation rates.