Justin William pokes his brain and see how does it react through a microscope.

He examines how it responds to the outer world, to the disturbances and the external stimuli, the initial results have already provided new insights. Needless to say ,Williams , at the university of Wisconsin, Madison is not needling his own brain, rather the sample is taken from the mouse and is held on a chip -' Brain-on-a-chip' device. The tissue is suspended in between two plastic chips and is placed in a nutrient medium. The brain is just the latest organ to be replicated in a miniature form. From beating heart to breathing lungs, livers to fallopian tubules, the list of the inclusions in the miniature world are growing nevertheless. Moreover, efforts are being laid down to find a mechanism to connect some of the miniature version of the chips to step towards creating a body-on-a-chip. The new findings which place the micro organs of the living core of animal cells in a nutrient rich fluid and revealing how cells respond in a body that the traditional mechanisms of placing the cells in traditional culture fail to do.

Haward University's wyss Institue for biologically inspired engineering created a "breathing " lung-on-a-chip and observed the breathing mechanism itself, like how the cells contract and relax and the potentially harmful effects the potentially harmful nanoparticles could produce. The static placement of cells in the nutrient medium could have missed the essence of breathing. Such responding of a organ model could be of great help to study how the effect of external stimuli and response to the drugs.

Moreover, this shares a potential to eliminate the use of animals for tests in research labs. It is an expensive and time- consuming method, still linked to an uncertainty as animals are not always the representative of human physiology. This approach could be personalized by building them from individual's own cells. The doctors in labs could chalk out if any harm is linked with the prescribed therapy by experimenting it with their individualized model. This could be highly useful in case of cancer as the different therapies play a different effect on different individuals. The side outcomes always fit in different range. This could give us an instant yes or no whether it would work or not. It could be a shortcut for tedious clinical trials. To realize these goals Ingber and Kevin Kit Parker at wyss Institute, are going beyond creating isolated versions of organs-on-a-chip and beginning them to connect together. The heart cells are myogenic -they beat by themselves - just like those in a living heart, and by measuring the degree of polymer bends , it can be seen if the cells are contracting properly. This makes it an ideal model to test the drugs for heart failure- a condition in which cardiac cells often fail to contact strongly enough .

VirtualHuman
From beating heart to breathing lungs, livers to fallopian tubules, the list of the inclusions in the miniature world are growing nevertheless. Efforts are being laid down to connect miniature version of the chips towards creating a body-ona-chip.
C L I N I C Study the effect of external stimuli and response to the drugs. Eliminate the use of animals for tests in research labs. Highly useful in case of cancer. Personalized Human models. Shortcut for tedious clinical trials. Test the effects of aerosolbased drugs on the heart.

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This heart could be joined with the heart -to mimic organ-to-organ interactions. The heartlungs device could be used to test the effects of aerosol-based drugs on the heart, as well as the cardiac output in case of inhaled particles and in general air pollution.

However the ultimate test would be if the lungs could oxygenate the heart tissues, it is still being worked. That could entirely change the outlook of the research labs if the motley appearing chips could mimic all what goes in our body. One of the brain region that Williams has kept alive in chip form the medulla- a part in the brainstem that is involved in automatic functions like breathing. It has been found that the tissue would continuously and automatically send out neural signals that causes person to breathe. His team has attached electrodes to the nerve roots in the brain sample to tap into those signals . It would be relatively easier to use them to drive the pump that makes a a lung-ona-chip breathe. The idea for whole-body model is in line after the successful footmarks of the organs mimics. Next most critical organs for consideration would be kidneys, gut, and liver, which are involved in drug metabolism and excretion. Ongoing models include work on gut's microbiome-its bacteria and their environment on a chip., liver-on-a-chip. However the ultimate success of human-on-a-chip is not an overnight deal but for the drugs delivery system and basic research are certainly an extraordinary step.