Medical devices on chips

The development of medical-device technology is constrained by the financial and ethical considerations of animal testing and clinical trials. Organ-on-a-chip systems are being developed to speed up drug development, yet there has been little recognition or support for the use of this technology in the development and testing of medical devices. In this Perspective, we introduce the concept of medical-device-on-a-chip (MDoC), highlight possible applications and discuss the potential of microfluidic high-throughput technologies for achieving significant time and cost savings over conventional testing. Rather than testing an entire macroscale device, a MDoC has the ability to recapitulate biological function in a physiome associated with medical-device use and to test interactions with device components. In the clinic, MDoCs could also incorporate individual human samples for personalized diagnostics. We also review research towards the integration of key elements of organ-on-a-chip technologies with medical-device testing.