Building in Vitro Models of Human Barriers Tissues

We have focused our recent efforts on building a “Body-on-a-Chip” as a human surrogate for both drug testing and as model for testing the potential human toxicity of chemicals or chemical mixtures. Such a model consists of barrier tissues (such as skin, GI tract, blood brain barrier, kidney, etc.) and integral body organs (such as liver, heart, fat, etc). These barrier tissues control the uptake and presentation of drugs and chemicals to the rest of the body. Typically cells representing the barrier tissue are supported on a membrane, but ideally a very open porous membrane so that transport limitations are controlled by the cell barrier rather than the supporting membrane. In this talk I will focus on examples and issues in terms of building barrier tissue models and their integration with the whole body model.