Check out our novel Heart-on-Chip in Materials Today Bio: Led by PhD students Oliver Schneider & Alessia Moruzzi, we developed an Organ-on-Chip housing human induced pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiac tissues and integrating oxygen sensors developed by the Mayr Lab at TU Graz. Besides sensor integration, we describe i) a novel way for robust generation of 3D cardiac tissues by fusing spheroids in microfluidic chambers, ii) a scalable microfabrication process for PDMS-free platforms, and iii) a blueprint for a cheap, opensource, plug&play pacer. With this integrated Heart-on-Chip, we monitored changes in oxygen metabolism depending on the beating activity of human cardiac tissue in real-time. For the future, the model has great potential, e.g., for assessment of cardiotoxicity of drugs and studies on cardiac metabolism.
