Tackling Current Biomedical Challenges With Frontier Biofabrication and Organ-On-A-Chip Technologies

In the last decades, biomedical research has significantly boomed in the academia and industrial sectors, and it is expected to continue to grow at a rapid pace in the future. An in-depth analysis of such growth is not trivial, given the intrinsic multidisciplinary nature of biomedical research. Nevertheless, technological advances are among the main factors which have enabled such progress. In this review, we discuss the contribution of two state-of-the-art technologies–namely biofabrication and organ-on-a-chip–in a selection of biomedical research areas. We start by providing an overview of these technologies and their capacities in fabricating advanced in vitro tissue/organ models. We then analyze their impact on addressing a range of current biomedical challenges. Ultimately, we speculate about their future developments by integrating these technologies with other cutting-edge research fields such as artificial intelligence and big data analysis.

This study was supported by the National Science Centre—Poland (NCN) within the POLONEZ 3 fellowship number 2016/23/P/NZ1/03604 which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 665778. This study is also supported by the National Science Centre Poland (NCN) within PRELUDIUM 19 Project No. 2020/37/N/ST5/03272 to NC. This work was also supported by the National Science Centre (NCN) under the Grant No.: UMO-2016/23/Z/ST8/04375 (BIOMEMBRANE project (M-ERA.NET2 project 4246)).