Kidney on a Chip using Cell Sheet Engineering

The current state-of-the-art for kidney toxicity testing requires extensive use of animal models to satisfy regulatory requirements. There is an increasing need for alternative methods of toxicity screening for pharmaceutical products led by economic, ethical and academic factors. At present cell culture based assays provide an inadequate method for toxicity screening and there is considerable interest in improving this to provide a better tool for early stage screening in the drug development cycle. Current organ-on-a-chip concepts for kidney studies are essentially miniaturised cell culture assays confined to a single cell type grown on a porous substrate. This does not adequately model the appropriate anatomy of the filtration components of the kidney. In order to improve on these designs we need to develop co-culture cellular models that better represent the kidney in vitro. Here we present preliminary work on a novel kidney on a chip concept using cell sheet engineering to address the challenge of producing an organ-on-a-chip model of the kidney glomerulus.