SI-02

(Oral presentation, session Smart Industry, 14.10 - 14.30 hrs)

Cardiac diseases are the most common causes of death of humans around the world. In most cases, heart transplantation is the only way to treat patients. However, the lack of donors and the response of the immune system preclude the treatment in a huge number of clinical cases and therefore discovering new drugs for various heart diseases is of huge interest.

Organ-on-a-chip technology utilizing true human cells cultured in perfused microfluidic devices holds great promise to revolutionize pharmaceutical drug testing for heart-related diseases and personalized medicine with medical decisions, practices, and/or products being tailored to the individual patient. Diagnostic testing is often employed for selecting appropriate and optimal therapies based on the context of a patient’s genetic content or other molecular or cellular analysis.

The main goal of our RAAK MKB project Heart-on-a-Chip is to fabricate standardized, robust generic heart-on-a-chip demonstrator devices that will be validated and further optimized to generate new physiologically relevant models to study cardiotoxicity in vitro. To achieve this goal various aspects will be considered, including (i) identifying alternative, improved materials for fabricating the chips, (ii) modification and treatment of the surfaces (chemistry and topology) of the microfluidic channels within the chip, (iii) realizing 2D/3D cardiomyocyte cell culture in the chip, in which the cells are properly aligned and remain alive for a long time, (iv) integrating in-line sensors within the devices and, finally, (v) the chip design.

Within this presentation you will be informed about the midterm progress of the research project “Heart-on-a-Chip”, in which Saxion has been working together for one year in close collaboration with a number of small and medium sized high-tech SMEs.