Tissue-on-a-chip design for skin modeling

Overcoming the challenges that the pharmaceutical industry currently faces requires the development of more sophisticated models of the human body. Tissue- and organ-on-a-chip technologies have arisen as a new enabling platform for organ modeling and drug screening based on bioinspired microfluidic systems. These devices have the potential to replicate the complex tissue architectures and organ-level interactions that dominate the systemic response to a drug. The present work describes the design, modeling, fabrication and testing of a skin-biomimetic microfluidic device that can recapitulate skin physiology and architecture. The skin-on-a-chip developed herein is capable of accommodating a bioengineered skin equivalent continuously perfused through a microvascular channel, thus providing a solid proof of concept of the feasibility of a skin-modeling device for drug screening.Ingeniería Biomédic