Harvard University researchers have created a variety of different human organs and systems on chips including lungs, kidneys, intestines, skins and bone marrow, as well as the newest and most advanced being the heart-on-a-chip. This new chip may lead to an array of personalized medicine breakthroughs as well as eliminating the need for animal testing due to the new possibilities of testing these man-made organs rather than testing on animals.

 “We are pushing the boundaries of three-dimensional printing by developing and integrating multiple functional materials within printed devices,” said coauthor of the study, Jennifer Lewis. “This study is a powerful demonstration of how our platform can be used to create fully functional, instrumented chips for drug screening and disease modeling.”

This technology is so advanced that researchers are capable of taking skin cells from a patient to turn into stem cells and then into cardiac cells, which makes it possible to aid something such as heart complications by matching the exact genetic profile of the patient. This allows researchers to then investigate potential therapies and even medications to help fulfill individual patient’s exact needs.

“This might sound a bit like science fiction, but our lab has already been part of investigating patient specific therapies using heart-on-a-chip devices in a previous study,” stated Johan Lind, the first author of the journal Nature Materials, written about the new findings of this technology.

 The organs-on-chips are made from a clear, flexible polymer around the size of a computer memory stick, which contain hollow channels connected with cell-lined artificial blood vessels. The chips can be manipulated to mimic the physical microenvironment of living organs. The representation of the real environment is so accurate within these chips that breathing motions in lungs and peristalsis-like deformations in the intestines, which are involuntary constriction and relaxation of the muscles, are able to be represented.

This new and advanced 3-D manufacturing process will open up a whole new world of opportunities including the creation and development of new personalized medicine specifically for helping out individual patients as well as being able to combine a variety of organs-on-chips allowing scientists to see how they would react when functioning together in a single biological system, which could be beneficial to see how diseases impact the human body as a whole.