Organ-on-Chip

Prof. Dr. Peter Loskill
Next Generation Cellular and Organotypic Assays
Senior Principal Scientist

+49 7121 51530-699

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In the Organ-on-Chip group, we focus on the development and validation of Organ-on-Chip (OoC) systems and enabling technologies, as well as the application of OoC models in basic research, drug development, and pharmacological research, personalized medicine, consumer protection, and toxicology. With our international team, we work at the interdisciplinary intersection of materials science, engineering, physics, biology, and medicine.

Organ-on-chip systems are small microfluidic platforms that integrate living substructures of organs into a controlled microenvironment and replicate one or more aspects of the organ’s in vivo dynamics, functionality, and (patho)physiology. This allows complex human biological processes to be physiologically simulated outside the human body. Through the small, three-dimensional chambers and channels on the micrometer scale integrated into the chips, as well as specific geometric, mechanical, and biological properties and components, the natural, physiologically perfused microenvironment of cells within a tissue can be mimicked. Organ-on-chip systems thus combine the unique features of classical cell assays (human cells and genes) and animal models (complex 3D tissues and blood circulation). These so-called in vitro test systems can be used to address a wide variety of medical, biological, pharmacological, and toxicological questions without the need for laboratory animals.

In close cooperation with the 3R-Center Tübingenfor in vitro models and animal testing alternatives, we thus offer the possibility to reduce the use as well as the necessity of animal testing according to the guidelines of the 3R principle (Replace, Reduce, Refine), to increase the transferability of preclinical results to the clinical phases and thus to make the entire development more cost-effective, safer and faster.

Development of testing systems

• Design and development of microfluidic solutions for cell applications
• Combination of microfluidics, biomaterials and 3D tissues
• Development of microphysiological organ-on-a-chip systems
• Functional testing and validation of in vitro models
• Development of fluidic solutions for cultivation and differentiation of stem cells

Evaluation of external microfluidic platforms

• Establishment of microphysiological tissue models and assays in external microfluidic platforms
• Validation of phyiological cultivation parameters
• Determination of viability and functionality of tissue units
• Establishment of endpoints and assay developments
• Substance testing

Techniques, methods, equipment

• Chip fabrication labs with a wide variety of patterning and joining methods such as lithography, laser cutting, hot stamping, 3D printing, thermo-mechanical joining and laser welding
• Microfluidic application lab for chip culture and simultaneous documentation
• Cell culture laboratories for stem cell work and genetic engineering work
• Isolation of a range of human cell types and differentiation of stem cells
• Functional assays: including cytotoxicity, proliferation, apoptosis
• Read-outs of media supernatants from capillary channels as well as the direct cellular environment
• Provision of samples extracted from chips
  for protein expression
• RNA expression
• Immunohistochemistry of organs-on-chips
• Gene expression analysis
• Wide-field and confocal microscopy, fluorescence microscopy
• Live cell imaging and image analysis
• Fluorescence microscopy for quantitative and qualitative analysis of cell interactions in chips
• Fluorescently labeled proteins (e.g. for analysis of living cells)
• GFP expression
• Quantitative and qualitative fluorescence microscopic analysis of formed 3D microtissue structures