TOWARDS AN IN-VITRO LIVER LOBULE MODEL

Drug-induced liver toxicity is the main reason for pharmaceutical product ban or withdrawal. Toxicity drug screening is currently performed either in-vitro on static 2D and 3D hepatocyte cultures, which limit toxicity assessment at the molecular level, or on animals, which are phylogenetically different from humans. In order to overcome such limits, bio-inspired chips, known as liver-on-chips, mimicking the liver architecture at the micro- and nano-scale have been proposed. In-vitro culture of hepatocytes on liver-on-chips has been demonstrated to be more effective in terms of hepatocyte phenotype maintenance and viability, with respect to the standard in-vitro counterpart, thanks to the closest morphological similarity with the in- vivo environment of the liver. The long term aim of this work is to model the smallest functional unit of the liver, which is the hepatic lobule (Fig. 1a), on a silicon chip and integrate it together with electrical, mechanical and fluidic components, thus exploiting the unique peculiarity of the silicon technology.