Abstract

The advent of the miniaturization approach has influenced the research trends in almost all disciplines. Bioengineering is one of the fields benefiting from the new possibilities of microfabrication techniques, especially in cell and tissue culture, disease modeling, and drug discovery. The limitations of existing 2D cell culture techniques, the high time and cost requirements, and the considerable failure rates have led to the idea of 3D cell culture environments capable of providing physiologically relevant tissue functions in vitro. Organ-on-chips are microfluidic devices used in this context as a potential alternative to in vivo animal testing to reduce the cost and time required for drug evaluation. This emerging technology contributes significantly to the development of various research areas, including, but not limited to, tissue engineering and drug discovery. However, it also brings many challenges. Further development of the technology requires interdisciplinary studies as some problems are associated with the materials and their manufacturing techniques. Therefore, in this paper, organ-on-chip technologies are presented, focusing on the design and fabrication requirements. Then, state-of-the-art materials and microfabrication techniques are described in detail to show their advantages and also their limitations. A comparison and identification of gaps for current use and further studies are therefore the subject of the final discussion.

MeSH

Cells, Microtechnology, Technology, Research, Tissues, Drug Discovery, Cell Culture Techniques, Microfluidics

Cited by

• Current progress and challenges in the development of brain tissue models: How to grow up the changeable brain in vitro? J Tissue Eng, 2024
• Hybrid-integrated devices for mimicking malignant brain tumors ("tumor-on-a-chip") for development of targeted drug delivery and personalized therapy approaches. Front Med (Lausanne), 2024
• Organ-on-chip systems as a model for nanomedicine. Nanoscale, 2023
• Cancer-on-chip: a breakthrough organ-on-a-chip technology in cancer cell modeling. Med Biol Eng Comput, 2025
• Thin-Film-Based Multifunctional System for Optical Detection and Thermal Treatment of Biological Samples. Biosensors (Basel), 2022
• Engineering Organ-on-a-Chip to Accelerate Translational Research. Micromachines (Basel), 2022
• Organs-on-chip technology: a tool to tackle genetic kidney diseases. Pediatr Nephrol, 2022
• Organ-On-A-Chip: A Survey of Technical Results and Problems. Front Bioeng Biotechnol, 2022
• Musculoskeletal Organs-on-Chips: An Emerging Platform for Studying the Nanotechnology-Biology Interface. Adv Mater, 2025
• Engineering with Biomedical Sciences Changing the Horizon of Healthcare-A Review. Bioengineered, 2024
• Microfluidic Organ-on-a-Chip Devices for Liver Disease Modeling In Vitro. Micromachines (Basel), 2022
• Microphysiological systems for human aging research. Aging Cell, 2024
• Challenges in current inhalable tobacco toxicity assessment models: A narrative review. Tob Induc Dis, 2024
• Recent Progress in PDMS-Based Microfluidics Toward Integrated Organ-on-a-Chip Biosensors and Personalized Medicine. Biosensors (Basel), 2025
• Targeted Cancer Therapy-on-A-Chip. Adv Healthc Mater, 2024
• Exploring oncology treatment strategies with tyrosine kinase inhibitors through advanced 3D models (Review). Med Int (Lond), 2025
• Microenvironments Matter: Advances in Brain-on-Chip. Biosensors (Basel), 2023
• Developments and Clinical Applications of Biomimetic Tissue Regeneration using 3D Bioprinting Technique. Appl Bionics Biomech, 2022
• Organ-on-a-chip technologies for biomedical research and drug development: A focus on the vasculature. Smart Med, 2023
• Lung cancer intravasation-on-a-chip: Visualization and machine learning-assisted automatic quantification. Bioact Mater, 2025