Bioengineer Dan Huh’s research focuses on creating organs-on-chips: specially manufactured micro-devices with human cells that mimic the natural cellular processes of organs. Huh’s lab has engineered chips that approximate the functioning of placentas and lung disease, some of which were launched into space in May and returned to Earth this week.
In a special issue of Science featuring the science of growing human organ models in the laboratory, Huh and graduate students Sunghee Estelle Park and Andrei Georgescu consider how organs-on-a-chip could be combined with another engineered organ technology.
Organoids grow and develop much like organs do in the body yet are small enough to fit in a petri dish. Huh’s organs-on-chips are built differently: Cells from the relevant organs are grown within a fabricated device that imitates some of the organ’s functions and natural environment.
Organoids can let researchers mirror the human body in a more realistic way than chip-based tissue models. But they can be harder to control as they develop, and that variability can have implications for the precisely controlled nature of research.
In a video accompanying the review article, Huh explains how organoid and organ-on-a-chip technologies differ and the advantages that accompany each approach.
“What's compelling is to combine the physiological realism of organoids with control ability and reproduce ability of organ-on-a-chip technology to develop a more advanced system that would give us the best of both worlds,” Huh says.
Read more at Penn Engineering.
Dan Huh is the Wilf Family Term Assistant Professor in the Department of Bioengineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Pennsylvania.
