Chip organ simulation won the Design of the Year 2015 award

This year's Design of the Year award has been awarded by the London Design Museum for a unique medical device called Organs-On-Chips. This is a chip that simulates organs in the human body and was first published in 2010 by researchers at Harvard University's Wyss Institute. So why is a medical device honored about design?

The organ simulation chip of the Wyss Institute won the Design of the Year 2015 award

Paola Antonelli, who is in charge of design and architecture at the Museum of Modern Art, thinks that Organs-On-Chips is a symbol of design creativity. She said: "In the case of Organs-On-Chips, the shape of the device is not only impressive but also the function - the idea behind this object ."

Meanwhile, Donald Ingber, biological engineer and founder of Wgs-On-Chips and Wgs-On-Chips institute, said: "Most of us think that shape must follow function but this is exactly the opposite in biology. "

The structure of a biological system will certainly impact its performance, but Ingber argues that the design principle applies to both shape and function. He stressed: "If you change functions, you can actually correct the structure ." Organs-On-Chips also outlines the most basic design principles: that is efficiency. Ingber said: "Design in the simplest aspect is minimizing every system down to its composition to get the greatest impact."

Organs-On-Chips integrates micro-tubes. Air, nutrients, blood and pathogenic bacteria can be pumped into these tubes. The chip is produced in a process very similar to computer semiconductor chips, but instead of moving electrons through silicon, Organs-On-Chips will put a certain amount of chemical through the cells from the lungs and intestines. , liver, kidney and heart. This network of microscopic tubes is called a microfluidic channel and it allows the chip to simulate the structure and function of a complete organ.

Organs-On-Chips can effectively replace the three-dimensional structures of an organ, such as the glands of a kidney, pulmonary, and blood vessels in the liver with on-chip microfluidic channels. After that, the chip can simulate the mechanism of these structures.

An example, letting air blow through a channel combined with vacuum aspiration to create curved motion helps simulate patterns when we breathe. The outer transparent polymer cover will allow scientists to see what is happening inside an organ at a micro scale. Prototypes can also be linked together to create a network of organs in the human body.

With these functions, Organs-on-Chips becomes a great testing platform for pharmaceutical research . The ultimate goal of Organs-On-Chips is to reduce dependence on lab animals and reduce the time and cost of developing pharmaceuticals. Last year, researchers at the Wyss Institute set up a company called Emulate and are currently working with companies like Johnson & Johnson to conduct pre-clinical tests.