Unlocking the future: converging multi-organ-on-a-chip on the current biomedical sciences

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Unlocking the future: converging multi-organ-on-a-chip on the current biomedical sciences Sayan Basak 1 Received: 23 June 2020 / Accepted: 12 September 2020 # Qatar University and Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020

Abstract The current clinical studies on drugs take years to complete, prolonging the effective time taken from drug discovery until its availability in the market. Moreover, it fails to predict precisely the human pathophysiological reaction when administered with the drug. The emergence of “lab-on-a-chip” serves as an alternative to providing smooth, effective, economical, and precise experimental results to pave the way for new drug development and personalized medicines that aim to mimic the human body on a laboratory chip. This perspective is an attempt to focus on the growth of the artificial organs and how it addresses the shortcomings faced in traditional clinical trials. The “multi-organ-on-a-chip,” with its inherent potential, made it to the top 10 emerging technologies in the World Economic Forum, and this narration attempts to tether both the evolutionary viewpoint and the current developmental purview of this burgeoning scientific progress. Keywords Multi-organ-on-a-chip . Microfluidic technology . Physiological model . Modular platform . Drug testing . Disease modeling

1 Introduction The greater realms of human welfare have demanded swift advancements in the preclinical stages of drug development [1]. Interestingly, although the amount of funding that had tunneled toward the research and development of novel drugs had grown significantly, the number of new medicines that have successfully cleared the preclinical, clinical, and regulatory trials are much less [2]. Thus, the number of drugs launched to the market has declined steadily when contrasted with the amount of funding funneled over the past 50 years [1, 2]. Despite the advancements in the domains of applied medical sciences and engineering along with developing modern strategies that have evolved, the contemporary preclinical stages of drug development have failed to predict the drug response behavior accurately when employed in the human body [1–3]. This is one of the prime reasons for the anomalies and the inaccuracy in the environmental condition in which the in vivo tests are being carried out. Amidst the fact that the * Sayan Basak [email protected] 1

Department of Polymer Science and Technology, University of Calcutta, 92, APC Road, Kolkata, West Bengal 700009, India

present biochemical environments for swift drug discoveries provide a more controllable environment, therefore offering a better visualization of the process, it fails to mimic the realistic biochemical milieu in the human body in terms of mechanical properties and drug diffusion kinetics [2, 3]. With more than $2.6 billion required to transit a drug from the discovery to the reality approval, it is evident that most of the drugs attain a high value at the later phases of clinical trials [1]. Moreover, precision designing and testing of the develope