Drug development critically depends on preclinical models that mimic human physiology, yet traditional two-dimensional cultures and animal models often lack predictive power.

Cardiovascular diseases are a leading cause of death worldwide, and better models are urgently needed for disease progression studies and drug development.

There is an urgent need for more physiologically relevant cell culture methods to guide compound selection in pre-clinical stages of the drug development pipeline.

Dying from viral infection due to organ failure and blood loss: we still know little about how it can happen. Among other things, Huaqi Tang developed an organ-on-a-chip to figure it out. 'These technologies can offer unprecedented opportunities to fight the viruses that threaten our society.' Tang…

This thesis tackles the difficulty of predicting the liver’s clinical response to novel therapies, a challenge arising from interspecies differences and limitations of existing in vitro models.

For medical research, researchers often recreate tissue in the lab. Organ-on-a-chip technology emulates organs, right down to the blood that flows through them, thus creating a realistic test model for drugs or research into disease processes. Researchers from the LUMC are coordinating an NWO Gravitation…

Predicting whether someone will fall ill and which treatment will benefit them most: that is the aim of the techniques that Professor of Analytical Biosciences Thomas Hankemeier and his research group are developing at Leiden University. In order to scale up and further develop this technology, he works…

How do organs work in the body, and how can we create mini-organs to study diseases and test new medicines? That’s the idea behind organ-on-a-chip technology. During his PhD, Flavio Bonanini worked on developing the best possible mini-livers. ‘Make them as simple as possible, and as complex as neede…

Mini organs-on-chips allow us to study how diseases develop and how drugs work. Although the technology is not new, it is becoming increasingly advanced. PhD candidate Bart Kramer hopes it will eliminate animal testing in the future.

A consortium of research groups, including that of LACDR professor Erik Danen, will use an NWO Perspective grant of nearly five million euros to build a universal standard for organ-on-chip models. They aim to stimulate the application of these chips in the biomedical and pharmaceutical industry. Danen…

Bioprinters that enable scientists to engineer complex tissues and organs. It sounds like science-fiction, but not for the scientists of the Alireza Mashaghi lab at the Leiden Academic Centre for Drug Research. The lab has recently been equipped with two state-of-the-art bioprinters: BioX and LumenX+.…