On 23 and 24 November, the first annual consortium meeting of the national collaborative project ‘SMART Organ-on-Chip’ was held in Eindhoven. This was a great in-person gathering of all 10 participating research groups, 25 partnering companies, institutes, and health organizations, and the industrial advisory board. Even though the project is not even one year underway, the PhD students working in the project enthusiastically presented impressive progress. Throughout the whole meeting, there were lively discussions about the technology, biology and applications/implementation, which resulted in new ideas and collaborative approaches; a theme that was high on the agenda was how the project can eventually maximize impact and several strategies were put forward. The meeting especially showed the importance, and the joy, of communicating between the various disciplines involved in Organ-on-Chip development.
SMART Organ-on-Chip is a large Dutch ‘Perspectief’ project initiated by and funded by NWO, aimed at developing a standardized open Organ-on-Chip platform, see https://smartooc.nl. The whole consortium consists of 10 Dutch research groups all connected through hDMT, and 25 companies, institutes, and health organizations as partners.
