Organ-on-chips are microfluidic devices containing human cells that are used to mimic the environment in human organs, including blood flow and breathing movements, serving as synthetic environments in which to test new drugs. Donald E. Ingber developed the first human Organ-on-Chip model in 2010. It was a ‘Lung-on-a-chip’ that mimicked biochemical aspects of the lung and its breathing motions. The potential of this technology in revolutionizing pharmaceutical developments:

• Personalized treatment: If the cells are isolated from patients and used to create the bio-mimetic tissues, the resulting organ chips can be used to develop personalized therapies for individual patients.
• Replacing animals for testing: The current scientific consensus is that animals mimic some human diseases well but not others. In cases where they cannot mimic a condition, a new drug that seems promising in pre-clinical studies is almost certainly bound to fail in human clinical trials. Also, this ensures an ethical approach.
• Expediting the clinical trials: Bringing a new drug into the market is a long, expensive, and challenging process ridden with failure, especially because of regulations attached to clinical trials on animals and human beings. Organ-on-Chip would therefore help in expediting the process. Also, the cost of producing these chips is not too exorbitant.
• Predicting the treatment outcomes: There has been a push towards developing new treatments and evaluating combinations of treatments. The researchers have successfully predicted the ability of a drug to treat or cause injury to an organ through this technology.
• Safety of food and cosmetic products: To predict how specific organs will respond to exposure to potential chemical hazards found in foods, cosmetics, and/or dietary supplements with greater precision than other methods currently being used, such as cell-culture or animal-based tests.

For more than a decade, scientists, pharmaceutical companies, and animal activists have been pushing regulators to include synthetic setups that mimic human diseases. Organ-on-a-Chip can be an answer to such demands.