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Adoption of organ-on-chip platforms by the pharmaceutical industry

Nature Reviews Drug Discovery volume 20, pages 961–962 (2021)Cite this article

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A key ambition of the organ-on-chip (OoC) field is to enable improved decision-making in drug discovery and development, based on leveraging the potential of OoC platforms to model human biology more effectively than traditional approaches, as reviewed by Low et al. (Nat. Rev. Drug Discov. 20, 345–361 (2021))1. This ambition has primed the establishment of multiple companies that have translated academic efforts into robust OoC platforms and made them commercially available on a service basis or as products over the past decade.

However, the extent to which these platforms are being adopted by the pharmaceutical industry and their impact on drug discovery is underexposed. With the aim of illuminating this area, here we highlight selected illustrative examples from publications where the application of commercial OoC platforms has been reported by researchers affiliated with pharmaceutical companies. A more comprehensive list of publications, together with the approach for identifying them, is described in Supplementary information.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Geraldine Hamilton, Lorna Ewart (Emulate) and Uwe Marx (TissUse) for providing input, and Henriette Lanz and Bas Trietsch for critical reading of the manuscript.

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  1. MIMETAS, De Limes 7, Oegstgeest, Netherlands

    Paul Vulto & Jos Joore

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  1. Paul Vulto
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  2. Jos Joore
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P.V. and J.J. wrote and edited the manuscript and created the tables.

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Correspondence to Paul Vulto.

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Competing interests

P.V. and J.J. hold equity in MIMETAS B.V. and serve as CEOs and executive board members of the company.

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Nature Reviews Drug Discovery thanks Thomas Neumann and the other, anonymous, reviewers for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Vulto, P., Joore, J. Adoption of organ-on-chip platforms by the pharmaceutical industry. Nat Rev Drug Discov 20, 961–962 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41573-021-00323-0

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