On-chip lobule-mimetic construction of heterogeneous cells and co-cuture via a logarithmical-concentration varying bioreactor

In vivo biomedical studies using animals can provide high similarity to the physiological conditions in humans. However, it is difficult to observe the molecular processes in the whole animals. On the contrary, in vitro studies could control the environmental factors in experiments but usually are difficult to reflect the complex physiological responses existing in vivo. In this paper, we report our Liver Chip research progress. Our updating Liver Chip development takes advantage of the dielectrophoresis force via lobule-mimetic-stellate- electrode array design and the in-situ co-culture bioreactor array with the feature of logarithmically-varying concentrations. In this study, a heterogeneous-cell type of engineered liver tissue mimicking the hepatic tissue has been developed in our group. The goal is to bridge the current gap between in vivo and in vitro studies, which can find applications in drug screening and disease research models.