Liver on chip platform : key questions following 15 years of development
Organ on chip technology is a promising platform for preclinical studies of new drugs or in predictive toxicology for chemicals. Such alternative methods are promoted to follow the 3R recommendations: reduce, refine, replace animal trials.
The culture of cells in biochips, in an adequate and perfused environment, demonstrated better and prolonged maintenance of cells’ functions or differentiation. However, such devices are not easy to handle, which might limit their use in classical laboratories. The biotransformation of xenobiotics achieved in the liver represents usually a key element to assess their toxicity either in the same organ or in others located downstream. Coupled to omics approaches, it may lead to the improved knowledge on the effects of substances alone or in mixture on different intracellular pathways.
In this presentation, we will first describe the state of the art on liver on chip, then describe our achievements in the parallelization of the culture to offer plug and play platform to end users, and finally illustrate the benefit of developing such tools in the framework of a hospital-university research project “Innovation in Liver Tissue Engineering” and for toxicology studies regarding pesticides promoted by ANSES agency.
Legallais1, R. Jellali1, E. Leclerc2
- Université de Technologie de Compiègne, UMR CNRS 7338 Biomécanique et Bioingénierie, cecile.legallais@utc.fr
- University of Tokyo, UMI CNRS 2820 LIMMS
Cécile Legallais is Director of Research at CNRS, and currently head of the UMR CNRS 7338 Biomechanics & Bioengineering at the Université de Technologie de Compiègne.
Cécile Legallais is Director of Research at CNRS, and currently head of the UMR CNRS 7338 Biomechanics & Bioengineering at the Université de Technologie de Compiègne. Bronze Medal from the CNRS in 2003, she focuses her research on the design and characterisation of (bio)artificial organs, combining experimental and modelling approaches at different scales. More specifically, she has worked on external bioartificial liver and liver on chip for 15 years, dealing with the microencapsulation of hepatic cells in alginate use, for use in a fluidized bed bioreactor, and the evaluation of microfluidic devices. From her background in fluid mechanics, she proposes to design or analyse existing bioreactors based on the understanding of fluid dynamics and mass transfer.
Author of more than 85 referenced publications, 7 book chapters & 6 patents, she is currently the president of the European Society for Artificial Organs (www.esao.org ).
Always strongly involved in teaching and coordinating activities, she was the Head of the Bioengineering Departmentt at UTC (2007-2013).
