Organ-on-a-Chip - Cross-flow membrane - Mini Luer

This Organ-on-a-Chip with a cross-flow membrane allows you to reliably mimic physiological conditions in vitro and study tissue organization, cell-cell interactions, barrier penetration, and physiological responses in a more in vivo-like environment.

Two different and independent culture chambers are available on the same chip. This allows you to perform two experiments in parallel or in series (body-on-a-chip).

The two chambers are designed to develop models of physiological barriers and to ensure an in vivo-like environment under static or dynamic flow conditions. Each chamber indeed has 2 flow inlets and 2 outlets for the perfusion of culture media and testing solutions in both the apical and basolateral compartments.

The entire body of the chip is made of Topas, a cyclic olefin copolymer (COC) to overcome the limitations of standard PDMS. Topas does not unspecifically absorb medium contents and has high stability and ideal optical characteristics for the bright field as well as fluorescence microscopy. Topas is frequently used in medical devices due to its proven biocompatibility.

The chip comes with three options of PET membranes having different pore sizes. Choose between a 0.2 µm, 0.4 µm, or an 8 µm porous membrane.

Features

• Mini Luer connection molded with the chip: leak-free
• Highly resistant and optically clear material: Topas (COC, cyclic olefin copolymer) has high transparency (equivalent to glass) and very low grade of auto-fluorescence
• Standard microscope glass slide size (75.5 mm x 25.5 mm x 1.5 mm)
• Cover lid thickness: 140 µm
• 2 independent cell culture chambers
• Porous PET membrane: pore Φ of 0.2, 0.4, or 8 µm

Cross-flow porous membrane	Upper/Apical compartment	Bottom/Basolateral compartment

Applications and examples from published papers

The upper and the lower compartments are separated by the porous membrane, and they can be perfused with different culture media. A tissue interface can be created to mimic alveolar, stomach, intestine, kidney, liver, brain-blood, skin functions, etc. Tissues inside the chip can be easily observed by microscopy.

Cell culture is just one potential application area of this versatile chip. The design indeed allows other different experiments such as small molecule transfer measurements, on-chip dialysis, and many more.

Intestine-on-chip

Maurer M. et al., A three-dimensional immunocompetent intestine-on-chip model as in vitro platform for functional and microbial interaction studies, Biomaterials 2019 (Download)

3D microphysiological model of the human intestine.

In this work, the model displays the physiological immune tolerance of the intestinal lumen to microbial-associated molecular patterns and can, therefore, be colonized with living microorganisms. The authors demonstrate that microbial interactions can be efficiently investigated using this chip creating a more physiological and immunocompetent microenvironment.

Endothelial Barrier-on-chip

Raasch M. et al., Microfluidically supported biochip design for culture of endothelial cell layers with improved perfusion conditions, Biofabrication 2015, 7: 015013 (Download)

The authors investigated cell viability, expression of endothelial markers, and cell adhesion molecules of ECs dynamically cultured under low and high shear stress. This chip allows an effective supply with nutrition medium, discharge of catabolic cell metabolites, and defined application of shear stress to ECs under laminar flow conditions.

They show that ECs cultured in the chip form a tight EC monolayer with increased cellular density and enhanced cell layer thickness compared to static and two-dimensionally perfused cell culture conditions. Endothelial layers in the chip express higher amounts of EC marker proteins von-Willebrand-factor and PECAM-1.

Liver-on-chip

Rennert K. et al., A microfluidically perfused three dimensional human liver model, Biomaterials 2015, 119-131 (Download)

The microfluidically perfused chip enables sufficient nutrition supply and resembles morphological aspects of the human liver sinusoid. It utilizes a suspended membrane as a cell substrate mimicking the space of Disse and the perfusion enhances the formation of hepatocyte microvilli. The authors stated that the perfused liver chip shares relevant morphological and functional characteristics with the human liver and represents a new in vitro research tool to study human hepatocellular physiology at the cellular level under conditions close to the physiological situation.

During culture in the biochip HepaRG cells consistently differentiate into cells exhibiting a hepatocyte phenotype and into cells with biliary epithelial cell phenotype that self-organize into a hepatocyte layer with functional bile ducts.