The Organizer: A Novel Platform for Mimicking Organ-Organ Interactions

It takes $2.5 billion and 10-12 years to develop a clinically applicable drug. However, more than 90% of drugs fail between animal and clinical trials, mainly due to efficacy and safety concerns.

To overcome this challenge, new technologies were developed, which better mimic human physiology, such as Organ-on-a-Chip (OoC), in which organ functions are simulated in microfluidic chips using human cells. Since the human body is a complex system with multiple organs, one of the biggest challenges is to create a multi-OoC platform, and thus ultimately a "body-on-a-chip" that supports multiple organs. There are a few experimental platforms available today, but unfortunately, they are still limited and not yet compatible and optimized with pharmaceutical companies.

In this work, we developed a modular high-throughput fluidic platform for human multi-organ-organ interactions, named “- The Organizer”, which meets the requirements that are missing on the market today. To generalize the platform and make it suitable for the pharmaceutical industry, our system design will allow for modularity and flexibility in the order in which organs are linked and the organs to be linked. Furthermore, the system is high throughput and user-friendliness.

In addition, we present the linkage of 3 organs (Gut-on-a-Chip) and (Liver-on-a-Chip) throughout a vascular layer and demonstrate how ethanol is affecting these organs.