Lung On A Chip

Organ-on-a-chip lung model from Harvard's Wyss Institute faces slow scientific adoption

In 2007, Harvard bioengineer Donald Ingber's team built a 'lung-on-a-chip'—a small polymer device lined with human lung cells that mimics breathing motion and reacts to bacteria and inflammatory proteins much like real lung tissue. Science initially rejected their 2010 paper unless they validated the chip against mouse experiments, which they did before publication; the study has since been cited nearly 5,400 times, yet organ-chip technology still struggles to replace animal testing in mainstream research.