Host: The Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers
Name : [in Japanese]
Date : September 05, 2021 - September 08, 2021
Organ-on-a-chip is a microdevice to reproduce the functions of organs and has recently attracted attention for their use in preclinical studies for the new drug development. Thanks to the physical stimulation applied to cells by repeatedly stretching a porous membrane across which two layers of living tissues were cultured, the cell-cell communication of a human lung on a chip was realized by Harvard University. However, external vacuum pumps were required to drive the device, so that the whole system could not be miniaturized and integrated into the chip. In this paper, we propose and develop a novel lung-on-a-chip device with a hydraulic power source inside by integrating ECF (Electro-Conjugate Fluid) micropumps. We successfully fabricate the PDMS microfluidic device having microfluidic channels with the porous membrane and evaluate its characteristics. Experimental results show the proposed device can have enough performance for lung-on-a-chip.
