22. Towards Reliable Organs-on-Chips and Humans-on-Chips

The artificial production of complete three-dimensional vascularized functional organs is still a research challenge, although recent advances are opening up new horizons to the treatment of many diseases by combining synthetic and biological materials to produce portions of veins, capillaries, arteries, skin patches and parts of bones and soft organs. Counting with artificially obtained completely functional replicas of human organs will constitute a benchmark for disease management, but there is still a long way to achieve the desired results and produce complete organs in vitro. In the meantime, having at hand simple biomimetic microsystems capable of mimicking the behaviour of complete complex organs, or at least of some of their significant functionalities, constitutes a realistic and very adequate alternative for disease modeling and management, capable of providing even better results than the use of animal models. These simplified replicas of human organ functionalities are being developed in the form of advanced labs-on-chips generically referred to as “organs-on-chips” and are already providing interesting results. This chapter provides an introduction to this emerging area of study and details different examples of organs-on-chips and their development process with the aid of computer-aided design and engineering technologies and with the support of rapid prototyping and rapid tooling resources.