MIND BLOWING TECH: These are Chips that Function Like A Human Organ

Design is the curator we all know and love. It assembles products that function well but also fits beautifully into our lives. It makes all the difference in the world when picking what to buy and good designs get copied a million times over.

That’s why it makes so much sense that the Wyss Institute at Harvard is receiving an exceptional amount of praise for their design on something they call, “Organ-on-Chips”. The chip is a small clear square that looks like nothing more than a piece of glass (it’s polymer plastic), but when you find out what it’s been doing, you’ll think it’s insane. Insanely impressive– that is.

Organ-on-Chips is quite literally what it’s called. These tiny chips contain tiny microfluidic channels lined up with human cells that make them function like an organ. You can pump blood cells through it’s artificial veins and you can build different organs that function a lot like ours. This provides wonderful insights to a future that doesn’t require animal testing.

The chip has been featured at the Museum of Modern Art for its brilliant design and its function is to provide a great pharmaceutical testing platform. And by integrating cutting-edge pharmaceutical research support into your workflow, you’ll streamline processes and enhance the accuracy of your findings. The specialized knowledge and resources provided ensure that every phase of your drug development is optimized for success. Advanced technologies, such as the Ultratech Stepper, play a pivotal role in ensuring precise microfabrication for these chips, further enabling breakthroughs in drug testing. With the chips, we can see how different chemicals affect our bodies, how our organs deal with bacteria—all right in front of our eyes without the hassle of invading a living body.

The scientists announced their studies in 2010 as a mere experiment, which today is so functional that it proves great promise and has been named the Design of the Year. What is phenomenal is that the design of the year has shifted from technological strides we often think of like a lightbulb, a beautiful building or a website to a biological breakthrough. This says a lot about how we have started to think of design. Paola Antonelli of The Museum of Modern Art says Organ on Chips is the epitome of design innovation providing us with a new frontier.

source | Wired

writer | angeldamion.com