Development of high throughput organ-on-chip assay incorporating 3D bioprinting technology for disease modeling studies

• Main Author: Lokadjaja, Matheus Calvin
• Other Authors: Tan Lay Poh
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2024
• Subjects: Engineering
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/176110
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Cancer has become an emerging health issue due to its evolution, developing resistance to standard of care drugs and genetic complexity. As a result, cancer treatment remains till this day a disease with unmet solution. While many drugs do progress beyond preclinical evaluation during drug development, many do fail to progress beyond clinical trials. This is attributed by the fact that animal models cannot effectively predict responses in humans and many drug companies still rely on conventional two-dimensional (2D) cell-based assays to perform drug screening due to the amenable nature of these models for high throughput screens. 2D cell models are unable to recapitulate the biology of tumours in the human body as it lacks appropriate cell-cell interactions and biomechanical cues that could affect drug responses. As such, with evolving cell culture technologies, drug companies have turned to three-dimensional (3D) cell cultures to assess the performance of drug molecules. Despite significant progresses that have been made within this field, it remains technically challenging to develop 3D assays for high throughput studies. In this project, we focused our efforts and have successfully developed a 3D tumour-on-chip assay, utilizing microfluidic technology and automated liquid handling to bioprint 3D tumours into miniaturized two-cell organ systems in a semi-high throughput manner. With more time investment to further optimize culture conditions, this assay would have potential to further enhance the success of drug screening approaches.