Organ-on-a-chip: key industry insights, challenges, and opportunities from 100+ NSF I-Corps interviews

Organ-on-a-chip (OoC) is a rapidly advancing technology with significant potential to revolutionize healthcare, drug discovery, and personalized medicine. OoC technologies offer cost-effective and ethical platforms that enable the acquisition of physiologically relevant data and enhance our understanding of human disease mechanisms and drug responsiveness. Over the past decade, numerous academic start-ups and spin-offs have sought to translate foundational research on OoC platforms from the lab bench to commercial and real-world applications. However, industry adoption of these systems has been limited, resulting in a marginal impact on personalized medicine and drug discovery – two key application areas for OoC technology. The U.S. National Science Foundation Innovation Corps (NSF I-Corps™) program, an entrepreneurial training program, provides a means to assess the commercialization potential of academically developed technologies, such as, for instance, OoC, by encouraging in-depth discussions with over 100 key stakeholders and potential customers within relevant areas. Our research group participated in the Fall 2024 cohort of the NSF I-Corps program, conducting 100+ (i.e. 102) interviews with OoC experts, clinicians, and professionals across the pharmaceutical and biotech industries. This perspective article summarizes our collective effort and the insights gained from this program, offering valuable knowledge for the OoC community. Overall, the vision of our NSF I-Corps interviewees highlighted the urgent need for OoC standardization, reproducibility, reliability, scalability, as well as ease of usability along with regulatory acceptance. Moreover, these interviews highlighted a critical gap between academic innovations and commercial applications, emphasizing the importance of bridging collaboration between the two entities. This perspective further explores the current commercialization potential of OoC technologies and outlines the key hurdles that must be addressed for OoC technologies to achieve broader adoption in drug discovery and personalized medicine.