New Products | Synvivo BBB on a chip and Lung brain axis on a chip

Applications of Organ-on-Chip Models

Organ-on-chip models have a wide range of applications in biomedical research because they allow scientists to recreate human organ functions in a controlled laboratory environment. Unlike traditional cell culture, where cells are grown on flat plastic surfaces, organ-on-chip systems expose cells to conditions that are closer to those found inside the body. These include fluid flow, mechanical movement, tissue-tissue interfaces, vascular perfusion, oxygen gradients, and communication between different cell types.

One important application is in disease modelling. Organ-on-chip systems can be used to recreate features of human diseases such as inflammation, cancer, infection, neurodegeneration, fibrosis, and vascular dysfunction. This allows researchers to observe how disease develops over time and how different cells contribute to disease progression. For example, a lung-on-chip can be used to study respiratory infection or inflammation, while a blood-brain barrier chip can be used to investigate neurological disease and barrier breakdown.

Another major application is drug discovery and drug testing. Organ-on-chip models can be used to test how new drug candidates behave in human-like tissues before they are tested in clinical trials. Researchers can study whether a drug is effective, whether it causes toxicity, how it moves through tissues, and whether it affects barrier integrity or vascular function. This is especially useful for identifying harmful effects earlier in development, reducing the risk of failure later in clinical testing.

Organ-on-chip models are also valuable for studying drug transport and delivery. Many drugs must cross biological barriers, such as the intestinal barrier, lung epithelium, kidney filtration barrier, vascular endothelium, or blood-brain barrier, before they can reach their target tissue. Chip-based models allow researchers to measure how well drugs cross these barriers and whether disease conditions make the barrier more or less permeable. This is particularly important for brain drug delivery, where the blood-brain barrier prevents many therapies from entering the central nervous system.

A further application is in personalised medicine. Cells from individual patients can be used to create patient-specific organ-on-chip models. This allows researchers to test how a particular patient’s tissue may respond to a drug or treatment. In the future, this could help clinicians choose the most effective therapy for a patient while avoiding treatments that are unlikely to work or may cause harmful side effects.

Organ-on-chip models can also help reduce reliance on animal testing. Animal models do not always accurately predict human responses because of biological differences between species. Since organ-on-chip systems use human cells and can recreate human-specific tissue functions, they may provide more relevant information about human disease and drug response. This makes them useful as complementary or alternative tools in preclinical research.

BBB-on-a-Chip

A blood-brain barrier, or BBB-on-a-chip, is used to model the protective barrier between the bloodstream and the brain. Its main application is in studying how substances enter or are blocked from entering the brain. This is important because many drugs that work in theory cannot be used effectively if they cannot cross the blood-brain barrier.

BBB-on-a-chip models can be used to investigate neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, brain cancer, stroke, and neuroinflammation. They can also be used to study how infection, inflammation, toxins, or trauma weaken the barrier. In drug development, BBB chips help researchers test whether potential treatments can cross into the brain, whether they damage the barrier, and how brain endothelial cells interact with neurons, astrocytes, pericytes, and immune cells.

SynTEER

SynTEER is useful because it allows researchers to measure barrier integrity directly inside organ-on-chip and microfluidic systems. Its key application is real-time monitoring of transepithelial or transendothelial electrical resistance, known as TEER. This measurement tells researchers how strong and intact a cell barrier is.

This is important in models where barrier function is central to the experiment, such as the blood-brain barrier, gut, lung, kidney, skin, and vascular endothelium. For example, in a BBB-on-a-chip study, SynTEER can show whether the barrier becomes weaker after inflammation or whether a drug helps restore barrier function. In gut or lung models, it can be used to measure how infection, toxins, allergens, or therapeutic compounds affect epithelial integrity.

Because SynTEER can monitor these changes without disturbing the culture, it allows researchers to follow barrier function continuously over time. This makes it useful for long-term experiments, toxicity studies, disease modelling, and drug screening.

Lung-Brain Axis Model-on-a-Chip

A lung-brain axis model-on-a-chip is designed to study communication between the respiratory system and the brain. This type of model is useful because diseases in one organ can affect another organ through circulating immune signals, inflammatory molecules, hormones, or toxic compounds.

One important application is the study of how lung inflammation or infection may contribute to neurological effects. For example, respiratory infections, air pollution, smoke exposure, or inflammatory lung diseases may trigger immune responses that influence the brain. A lung-brain chip can help researchers investigate how signals released by lung tissue affect blood-brain barrier function, neuroinflammation, neuronal activity, or brain cell health.

This model is also useful for studying systemic disease. Instead of looking at the lung and brain separately, researchers can examine how the two tissues communicate under controlled conditions. This can help explain why some respiratory conditions are associated with fatigue, cognitive symptoms, inflammation, or neurological complications.

VascuLink

VascuLink is applied in the development of vascularized tissue models. Many tissues in the human body depend on blood vessels to deliver oxygen and nutrients, remove waste, transport immune cells, and distribute drugs. Without a vascular component, many in vitro tissue models are limited because they do not fully recreate how tissues behave inside the body.

VascuLink allows researchers to study tissues under perfused, physiologic flow conditions. This means that cells can be exposed to continuous fluid movement that better mimics blood flow. This is important for studying vascular biology, endothelial barrier function, immune-cell trafficking, inflammation, thrombosis, angiogenesis, and drug delivery.

Another major application of VascuLink is connecting different tissue compartments together. This makes it possible to study multi-tissue or multi-organ interactions, such as how a drug absorbed by one tissue may affect another, or how inflammatory signals from one organ influence vascular or immune responses elsewhere. By incorporating vascular networks into organ-on-chip systems, VascuLink helps create more realistic and biologically relevant models for disease research, pharmacology, and tissue engineering.