Editorial
What is the Value of Tissue Chips?
| Eric Gottwald* | |
| Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Institute for Biological Interfaces-1, Hermannn-von-Helmholtz-Platz, Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen, Germany | |
| Corresponding Author : | Dr. Eric Gottwald Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) Institute for Biological Interfaces-1 Hermannn-von-Helmholtz-Platz Eggenstein- Leopoldshafen, Germany Tel: + 49-7247-822504 Fax: + 49-7247-825546 E-mail: eric.gottwald@kit.edu |
| Received December 09, 2010; Accepted December 13, 2011; Published December 15, 2011 | |
| Citation: Gottwald E (2011) What is the Value of Tissue Chips? J Biochip Tissue chip 1:e102. doi:10.4172/2153-0777.1000e102 | |
| Copyright: © 2011 Gottwald E. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. | |
Abstract
An increasing pressure, exerted on the one hand through ever increasing costs for the development of new drugs, and on the other hand by the public, that stipulates animal free research, has led to the development of more and more sophisticated in vitro test systems. Among them, special attention has to be turned on tissue chips since they have got an enormous potential with regard to being developed to true organ- on-chip or even mouse-on-chip-systems due to the organotypic behaviour of the cells, at least to some respects. The replacement of animal experimentation has been payed great attention to, at the latest since the introduction of the 3R-concept by Russel and Burch [1] and the 4R-principle by Banks [2]. The problems with animal experiments are tackled in different ways, like e.g. computer simulation studies, and micro dosing, but most notably by the development of appropriate in vitro-systems.
