Automated Design for Multiorgan-on-Chip Geometries

Abstract

Multiorgans-on-chips (multi-OoCs) represent human or other animal physiology on a chip—providing testing platforms for the pharmaceutical, cosmetic, and chemical industries. They are composed of miniaturized organ tissues (so-called organ modules) that are connected via a microfluidic channel network and, by this, represent organ functionalities and their interactions on-chip. The design of these multi-OoC geometries, however, requires a sophisticated orchestration of numerous aspects, such as the size of organ modules, the required shear stress on membranes and subsequently the flow rate, the dimensions and geometry of channels, pump pressures, etc. Mastering all this constitutes a nontrivial design task for which, unfortunately, no automatic support exists yet. In this work, we propose a design automation solution for multi-OoC geometries. To this end, we review the respective design steps and derive a corresponding formal design specification from them. Based on that, we then propose an automatic design tool, which generates a design of the desired device and exports it in a fashion that is ready for subsequent simulation or fabrication. The open-source tool and a step-by-step tutorial are available at https://github.com/cda-tum/mmft-ooc-designer. Evaluations (inspired by real-world use cases and confirmed by computational fluid dynamic simulations as well as a fabrication process) demonstrate the applicability and validity of the proposed approach.