Microfluidic Organs-on-Chips to Reconstitute Cellular Microenvironments

Recent advances in microsystems technology and tissue engineering have led to the development of biomimetic microdevices to model key functional units of human organs, known as organs-on-chips. By mimicking natural tissue architecture and microenvironmental chemical and physical cues within microfluidic devices, this technology realizes organ-level function in vitro that cannot be recapitulated with conventional culture methods. Since the physiological microenvironments in living systems are mostly microfluidic in nature, microfluidic systems facilitate engineering of cellular microenvironments. Microfluidic systems allow for control of local chemical gradients and dynamic mechanical forces, which play important roles in organ development and function. This organ-on-a-chip technology has great potential to facilitate drug discovery and development, to model human physiology and disease, and to replace animal models for efficacy and toxicity testing. This chapter shows an overview of the organ-on-a-chip technology to recapitulate cellular microenvironments and especially focuses on bone marrow-on-a-chip that enables culture of living bone marrow with a functional hematopoietic niche as a novel type of approach to develop organs-on-chips.