Fig. 8: Illustration of tumor-on-a-chip devices applied to drug screening.

a The microdissected tumor/tissue samples (MDTs) were incubated in independent chambers of a microfluidics chip to assess one or several selected drug candidates. Some were treated with drugs, and the others were kept as nontreated controls. MDTs were labeled with viability dyes: CTG (live, green) and PI (dead, red). Adapted with permission¹²¹. Copyright 2016, The Royal Society of Chemistry. b A vascularized and perfused organ-on-a-chip platform for large-scale drug screening has been applied to some FDA-approved anticancer drug-blinded screenings, successfully identifying both antiangiogenesis and antitumor drugs. Adapted with permission⁸⁶. Copyright 2017, The Royal Society of Chemistry. c Comparison diagram of the microfluidic chip models made by PMMA and PDMS. I The PMMA-PETE device with flat PETE membrane. II The PDMS-PETE device with wrinkled PETE membrane. III Confocal microscopic images of human lung adenocarcinoma cells cultured on PETE membrane in the PMMA and PDMS devices and stained with calcein. Adapted with permission¹⁶⁴. Copyright 2019, The Royal Society of Chemistry. d The five-chamber reconfigurable multiorgan system platform used to evaluate the efficacy and off-target toxicity of anticancer drugs. I Computational fluid dynamics modeling. II Photograph of the multi-organ system. III Representative phase contrast images of Kasumi-1 and megakaryocytes growing inside the multi-organ system chamber on days in vitro (DIV) 1, 7, and 14. Adapted with permission²³⁰.