Category Archives: Blog

What are Organs-on-Chips?

Educational article on the basics of organ on chip technology (in Dutch)

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Me and My corona

by Katja Wolthers, clinical virologist at Department Medical Microbiology, Amsterdam UMC/AMC. May 18. Only one positive patient in the late-night run, between over a hundred negative test results of the last days in our hospital laboratory. SARS-CoV2, causing Covid-19. It’s like my life as a clinical virologist suddenly became all about just one virus. Did I think I had seen it with the pandemic flu of 2009? Did I think the Ebola outbreak of 2014 was the worst I would ever see? Maybe it was, but SARS-CoV2 is the only virus I’ve seen so far with such an impact on...

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It’s Showtime!

by Berend van Meer, LUMC and University of Twente, January 2020 If one would ask me at a birthday party what I do, I would explain about Organs-on-Chip and tell them it is probably the most exciting field of research ever. Well, maybe apart from ‘Atlas’: robots are always cool. But then again, we – and this is a very royal “we” – have also made robots. “We” have made very cool images and movies. We have created hundreds of designs for different organ structures. And we have put some cells in many of them as well. Organs-on-Chip have been...

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News from the North

by Amalia Dolga, University of Groningen, October 2019 A few years ago, while interviewing for a Rosalind Franklin Fellow position at the University of Groningen, I was asked a very intriguing question by a member of the interview committee: “how could microfluidics contribute to the field of neuroscience?” The questioner was Prof. Elizabeth Verpoorte, and her question gave me a clear picture of the integrative and collaborative research environment in Groningen. This became more concrete over the years that followed as the two of us, together with two Master students, started to build multicompartment microfluidics chambers to grow cells and...

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Emerging viruses, a new challenge for hDMT?

Organ-on-Chip models for studying virus-host interactions by Barry Rockx, Department of Viroscience, Erasmus University Medical Center December 2018 Over the past few decades, newly emerging viruses have triggered international concern, raised scientific challenges, caused major human suffering and imposed enormous economic damage on an almost yearly basis. Due to the rapid developments in the field of next generation sequencing, more and more new viral sequences are detected in a variety of species every year. While the majority of these viruses will not impact human health, many of the newly emerged viruses that caused large outbreaks in humans in the past...

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Out of your comfort zone

Eye-on-Chip, an emerging theme in hDMT A true story by Andries van der Meer, University of Twente. September 2018 Earlier this year, I organized a workshop together with prof. Anneke den Hollander of the Radboudumc to discuss the challenges and opportunities for organ-on-chip technology to be used in studying, preventing and treating visual impairment and blindness. This ‘Eye-on-Chip Workshop’ was hosted by the DesignLab on the campus of the University of Twente, and was far from your typical scientific meeting. The program was not packed with back-to-back Powerpoint talks, and the participant list was not filled with scientists from a single...

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Connecting to make a joint

hDMT connects people to start new collaborations A true story continued (by Jaap den Toonder, TU/e) september 2017 The history A bright PhD student in the Microsystems group at TU/e, Hossein Eslami Amirabadi, was collaborating with the group of  John Martens at Erasmus MC to develop a “cancer-on-chip” device. Hossein developed a new way of integrating a well-defined fibrous matrix structure in a microfluidic device, which enabled him to study the migration of cancer cells under well-defined conditions. In this way, he was able to study the invasive behavior of cancer cells depending on their environment as well as that of...

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