LINK THEM UP

A body on a chip

Real drugs travel: absorbed in the gut, broken down in the liver, carried in the blood, acting on a target and cleared by the kidney. Linking organ chips with a shared circulating medium lets you follow that journey.

Linked chips turn a single dose into a time course, like a body does.

DESIGN RULES

Scaling a body down

Organ size Scale each tissue to its function, not just shrink everything equally

Shared medium One fluid must keep every cell type alive

Fluid volume Keep it small relative to the cells, or signals get diluted

Flow rates Match how long blood stays in each organ

Linking chips is easy to draw and hard to get right.

WHAT LINKING REVEALS

Organs talk to each other

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Toxic by-products

A liver can turn a harmless drug into one that harms another organ

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Real exposure

Gut absorption and liver breakdown set how much drug reaches the target

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Drug levels over time

Samples over time give curves that can be compared with patients

Some side effects only appear when organs are connected.

FROM CHIP TO PATIENT

Translating the numbers

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Chip results are fed into computer models of the human body to predict doses and drug levels in people. This combination of chips and computer modelling is one way regulators and companies hope to rely less on animals.

A chip's numbers become most useful when a model scales them up to a person.

A PATIENT ON A CHIP

Personal medicine

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Stem cells

Skin or blood cells reprogrammed into stem cells, then into organ cells

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One person

Every organ on the chip can carry the same person's genes

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Trials on chips

Groups of chips from many donors could test how drug responses vary

Linked chips from one donor could one day test a drug for that person.

UNIT 19 STUDY COMPLETE

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Ready for the Fab Challenge?

You've followed a drug through linked organ chips and seen the design rules and promise of a body on a chip.