Organ-on-Chip Centre Twente

Robert Passier, professor of the group Applied Stem Cell Technologies, works on miniature human heart models called heart-on-chips. It is his dream to produce innovative advanced human models, such as contracting and fluid-pumping mini-hearts. These organs-on-chips will closely resemble the developmental, structural, and functional aspects of human hearts in health and disease. 

Researchers of Applied Stem Cell Technologies, Ncardia, LUMC, and River Biomedics will collaborate to apply miniaturized heart models in COVID-19 research. Human pluripotent stem cell derived heart models will be used for a rapid evaluation of important COVID-19 therapies and for development of SARS-CoV-2 disease models to investigate how infection affects the heart. 

Much like all computer equipment interfaces through a Universal Serial Bus (USB), biologist should be able to use chips from different vendors to obtain an OoC model that specifically answers their questions of interest. 

The Translational Organ-on-Chip Platform (TOP) is a platform to provide infrastructure for automated microfluidic chip control, open for academic and commercial chip developers

Despite decades of research, there are still no drugs for many diseases. And the drugs that are available may only be effective in some patients or cause unwanted side-effects. Organ-on-Chip technology with human cells is a promising approach to address these problems.

In this booklet, researchers describe the challenges they face in developing these models and what is needed to implement them in practice.

The fifth annual hDMT Consortium meeting was held on November 12, 2021. Janny van den Eijnden-van Raaij, managing director of hDMT, presented the lustrum booklet of hDMT, called ‘Vital network on Organ-on-Chip’, which describes what hDMT is, what has been achieved during the past 5 years and where hDMT will go.