Evan LernerPenn Engineers Present New ‘Eye-on-a-Chip’
By Lida Tunesi
At the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Dan Huh and colleagues presented their research on a new ‘eye-on-a-chip,’ an artificial organ composed of living cells and a blinking, hydrogel eyelid. Researchers could potentially use the eye as a model to study conditions such as dry eye disease, and to test new treatments.
Huh, Wilf Family Term Assistant Professor in the department of Bioengineering, and his team have worked on an array of lab-grown organ models, including an earlier eye-on-a-chip, a placenta-on-a-chip, as well as lung-disease-on-a-chip. The hope is that the biomimetic systems will do a better job of simulating complex human tissue than cell cultures, and provide an ethical alternative to animal testing.
Read more at Science News.