Culture of cells as three-dimensional (3D) aggregates can enhance in vitro tests for basic biological research as well as for therapeutics development. Such 3D culture models, however, are often more complicated, cumbersome, and expensive than two-dimensional (2D) cultures. This paper describes a 384-well format hanging drop culture plate that makes spheroid formation, culture, and subsequent drug testing on the obtained 3D cellular constructs as straightforward to perform and adapt to existing high-throughput screening (HTS) instruments as conventional 2D cultures. Using this platform, we show that drugs with different modes of action produce distinct responses in the physiological 3D cell spheroids compared to conventional 2D cell monolayers. Specifically, the anticancer drug 5-fluorouracil (5-FU) has higher anti-proliferative effects on 2D cultures whereas the hypoxia activated drug commonly referred to as tirapazamine (TPZ) are more effective against 3D cultures. The multiplexed 3D hanging drop culture and testing plate provides an efficient way to obtain biological insights that are often lost in 2D platforms.

Microscale engineering technologies provide unprecedented opportunities to create cell culture microenvironments that go beyond current three-dimensional in vitro models by recapitulating the critical tissue–tissue interfaces, spatiotemporal chemical gradients, and dynamic mechanical microenvironments of living organs. Here we review recent advances in this field made over the past two years that are focused on the development of ‘Organs-on-Chips’ in which living cells are cultured within microfluidic devices that have been microengineered to reconstitute tissue arrangements observed in living organs in order to study physiology in an organ-specific context and to develop specialized in vitro disease models. We discuss the potential of organs-on-chips as alternatives to conventional cell culture models and animal testing for pharmaceutical and toxicology applications. We also explore challenges that lie ahead if this field is to fulfil its promise to transform the future of drug development and chemical safety testing.

The ultimate goal of most biomedical research is to gain greater insight into mechanisms of human disease or to develop new and improved therapies or diagnostics. Although great advances have been made in terms of developing disease models in animals, such as transgenic mice, many of these models fail to faithfully recapitulate the human condition. In addition, it is difficult to identify critical cellular and molecular contributors to disease or to vary them independently in whole-animal models. This challenge has attracted the interest of engineers, who have begun to collaborate with biologists to leverage recent advances in tissue engineering and microfabrication to develop novel in vitro models of disease. As these models are synthetic systems, specific molecular factors and individual cell types, including parenchymal cells, vascular cells, and immune cells, can be varied independently while simultaneously measuring system-level responses in real time. In this article, we provide some examples of these efforts, including engineered models of diseases of the heart, lung, intestine, liver, kidney, cartilage, skin and vascular, endocrine, musculoskeletal, and nervous systems, as well as models of infectious diseases and cancer. We also describe how engineered in vitro models can be combined with human inducible pluripotent stem cells to enable new insights into a broad variety of disease mechanisms, as well as provide a test bed for screening new therapies.

A network of elastomeric microfluidic components that generates sequential and oscillating flows from a steady input flow should allow more autonomous on-chip control of lab-on-a-chip systems. A critical need for enhancing the usability and capabilities of microfluidic technologies is the development of standardized, scalable and versatile control systems1,2. Electronically controlled valves and pumps typically used for dynamic flow regulation, although useful, can limit convenience, scalability and robustness3,4,5. This shortcoming has motivated the development of device-embedded non-electrical flow-control systems. Existing approaches to regulate operation timing on-chip, however, still require external signals such as timed generation of fluid flow, bubbles, liquid plugs or droplets or an alteration of chemical compositions or temperature6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16. Here, we describe a strategy to provide device-embedded flow switching and clocking functions. Physical gaps and cavities interconnected by holes are fabricated into a three-layer elastomer structure to form networks of fluidic gates that can spontaneously generate cascading and oscillatory flow output using only a constant flow of Newtonian fluids as the device input. The resulting microfluidic substrate architecture is simple, scalable and should be applicable to various materials. This flow-powered fluidic gating scheme brings the autonomous signal processing ability of microelectronic circuits to microfluidics where there is the added diversity in current information of having distinct chemical or particulate species and richness in current operation of having chemical reactions and physical interactions.