O – Organ on a Chip 

This short video explains how the design of the chips allows them to emulate organ–level functions. Credit: Wyss Institute at Harvard University

Donald Ingber, MD, PhD, the Wyss Institute’s Founding Director, was inspired to create Organ Chips in 2007 after watching a demonstration of a “lung-on-a-chip” that contained channels the size of human lung airways but no living cells. When the student who did that work, Dan Huh, later joined Ingber’s lab as a postdoctoral fellow, Ingber challenged the two of them to bring the idea to life. 

They set about figuring out how to create a molecular scaffold inside microfluidic channels that could support multiple living cell types to recreate the tissue interfaces found in lung air sacs. After much trial and error, they successfully created a living human lung-on-a-chip and published an article in Science about it in 2010. 

With additional grant support from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and National Institutes of Health (NIH), Ingber and his team at the Wyss Institute developed more than fifteen different Organ Chip models, including chips that mimic the lung, intestine, kidney and bone marrow.