Organ-on-a-disc: A platform technology for the centrifugal generation and culture of microphysiological 3D cell constructs amenable for automation and parallelization

Evidence from laboratory and animal studies provides groundwork for understanding mechanisms and potential before human studies continue.

• Level A · Stronger Clinical Evidence
• Level B · Emerging clinical evidence with positive signals
• Level C · Early human research exploring benefits
• Level D · Scientific groundwork from lab and animal studies
• Emerging · Emerging topic under active research

Abstract (original English)

Organ-on-a-chip (OoC) systems have evolved to a promising alternative to animal testing and traditional cell assays in drug development and enable personalization for precision medicine. So far, most OoCs do not fully exploit the potential of microfluidic systems regarding parallelization and automation. To date, many OoCs still consist of individual units, integrating only one single tissue per chip, and rely on manual, error-prone handling. However, with limited parallelization and automation, OoCs remain a low-throughput technology, preventing their widespread application in industry. To advance the concept of microphysiological systems and to overcome the limitations of current OoCs, we developed the Organ-on-a-disc (Organ-Disc) technology. Driven only by rotation, Organ-Discs enable the parallelized generation and culture of multiple 3D cell constructs per disc. We fabricated polydimethylsiloxane-free Organ-Discs using thermoplastic materials and scalable fabrication techniques. Utilizing precisely controllable centrifugal forces, cells were loaded simultaneously into 20 tissue chambers, where they formed uniform cell pellets. Subsequently, the cells compacted into dense 3D cell constructs and were cultured under vasculature-like perfusion through pump- and tubing-free, centrifugal pumping, solely requiring a low-speed rotation (<1 g) of the Organ-Disc. Here, we provide a

Evidence level

Evidence from laboratory and animal studies provides groundwork for understanding mechanisms and potential before human studies continue.

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