Research

Research Aim

Our principal research interests focus on microphysiological systems (MPS) and digital twin technology to develop advanced hybrid preclinical models with physiological relevance for various applications, including disease models, drug screening assays, and platforms for mechanistic studies.

Since 2017, the U.S. FDA has been evaluating and utilizing MPS to enhance the precision of pre-clinical testing, sparking significant interest in this cutting-edge system within the pharmaceutical industry. When properly developed, those engineered systems can be valuable assets for screening drug effects as pre-clinical models. However, challenges arise not only from the difficulty of replicating in vivo tissue functions in an in vitro model but also from the complexities of extracting physiologically relevant data and translating it into clinically meaningful information.

Therefore, we aim to present two main themes of our research, along with key considerations, as follows:

1) Advanced MPS to Generate Physiologically Relevant Data: achieving physiological relevance with the in vivo microenvironment, ensuring robust data, and enabling efficient, high-throughput production of parameter values.

2) Digital Twin for Clinical Translation: predicting in vivo trends based on MPS parameters, translating MPS information into pharmacological data, and revealing in vivo-in vitro correlations.