Automated and scalable fabrication of heart-on-chip devices

Reposted from the Centre for Research and Applications in Fluidic Technologies (CRAFT).

Love is in the air! This Valentine’s Day, it seems only fitting that we highlight a new article published by Professor Milica Radisic and her colleagues focused on the heart.

The article showcases a method for the automated and scalable fabrication of multiwell plate-based heart-on-a-chip devices. The sensing and structural components of the device are created by 3D printing of a thermoplastic elastomers with quantum dots, whereas the multiwell structures with integrated electrodes are built through hot embossing of polysterene.

The easy and rapid method described in this article scaled up the heart-on-chip platform from an 8-well chip to a 24-well and a 96-well format, resulting in an increase of platform fabrication efficiency of 175,000-69,000% per well.

The development of efficient, reliable and reproducible heart-on-a-chip models is a rapidly evolving field with significant potential for applications in drug discovery and disease modelling. The advances described in this article could facilitate the scaling up of other organ-on-chip models for high-throughput screening of drug candidates across different organ systems.

Publication: Wu Q, Xue R, Zhao Y, Ramsay K, Wang EY, Savoji H, Veres T, Cartmell SH, Radisic M. Automated fabrication of a scalable heart-on-a-chip device by 3D printing of thermoplastic elastomer nanocomposite and hot embossing. Bioact Mater. 2023 Nov 7. doi: 10.1016/j.bioactmat.2023.10.019.