Simulation of organ-on-a-chip systems

Abstract

This chapter will present the use of biomaterials in applications related to tissue engineering and artificial organs and examine how emerging and enabling technologies are being developed and applied, with a strong focus on fundamental and traditional tissue engineering strategies. The primary goal is to provide a systematic overview of the field from fundamentals to current challenges and opportunities in creating new functional tissue and to discuss enabling technologies such as simulation of organ-on-chip systems. This means that the first part of the chapter will be dedicated to the review of different studies on the topics of lung and liver cell line models, available methods, and discussion of current state-of-the-art. The second part will be related to in silico models of these organs—currently available in the literature as well as new models developed by the authors of this chapter. Since the main purpose of generation of organ-on-chips is to reduce and, at some point, replace experiments on the animals, several different organs were the point of interest in developing on-chip technology. This chapter will therefore present initial results of two models—one model of bioreactor for lung cells and the other of liver cell line aggregation. On the one hand, the importance of simulating flow of the fluid, containing the monocyte cells, through the bioreactor is significant for further analysis of the monocytes, meaning chemical reaction and binding of monocytes to the bottom of the bioreactor, in order to present the inflammatory process and reaction of the immune system. On the other, mathematical model of liver in the early stages of spheroidal multicellular aggregation process for particular case of hepatocytes is very interesting as the formation of aggregates has been shown to improve cell viability and functionality compared to traditional monolayer culture techniques. The chapter concludes with a discussion of our key findings and suggestions for future work.