Recently, Dr. Qingzhen Yang from BEBC has published a perspective paper in Biomicrofluidics entitled "Fabrication of Integrated Organ-on-a-Chip via Bioprinting". 

Organ-on-a-chip has emerged as a powerful platform with widespread applications in biomedical engineering, such as pathology studies and drug screening. However the fabrication of organ-on-a-chip is still a challenging task due to its complexity. For an integrated organ-on-a-chip, it may contain four key elements, i.e., a microfluidic chip, live cells/microtissues that are cultured in this chip, components for stimulus loading to mature the microtissues, and sensors for results readout. Recently, bioprinting has been used for fabricating organ-on-a-chip as it enables the printing of multiple materials, including biocompatible materials and even live cells in a programmable manner with a high spatial resolution. Besides, all the four elements for organ-on-a-chip could be printed in a single continuous procedure on one printer, in another word, the fabrication process is assembly free. In this paper, the authors discussed the recent advances of organ-on-a-chip fabrication by bioprinting. Lights are shed on the printing strategies, materials and biocompatibility. Besides, some specific bioprinted organs-on-chips are analyzed in details. Since the bioprinted organ-on-a-chip is still in its early stage, significant efforts are still needed. Thus the facing challenges together with possible solutions and future trends are also discussed.

Bioinspired Engineering and Biomechanics Center (BEBC) focuses on how to solve the medical problem by engineering tools. One of our research interests is organ-on-a-chip, including the fabrication techniques and its applications, due to its numerous merits in mimicking tissues/organs in vitro. Bioprinting is a powerful tool for biofabrication and has been adopted for organ-on-a-chip. However this is not well-known to researchers and this is the motivation of this paper, to discuss the advantages and/or disadvantages of integrated organ-on-a-chip fabrication via bioprinting. The authors of this paper include Dr. Qingzhen Yang from BEBC, Prof. Qin Lian from State Key Laboratory for Manufacturing System Engineering and also the Chair of BEBC, Prof. Feng Xu. This work is financially supported by the NSFC (51605377, 11522219, 11372243, 51375371).

Article Link: http://aip.scitation.org/doi/abs/10.1063/1.4982945