Biofabrication of a Cartilage Microphysiological System (OA-on-a-CHIP) for Osteoarthritis Disease Modelling and Therapeutic Testing

Osteoarthritis (OA) is a chronic, progressive, degeneration of articular cartilage (AC) which affects >500 million people worldwide. The majority of research into OA uses non-standardised animal models. These have several limitations including variable disease presentation / progression and species-species variation.

There is a significant need for in vitro engineered AC models which recreate the spatiotemporal changes in tissue composition and organisation to reduce the reliance on in vivo models.

This project will engineer a ‘cartilage on a chip’ system as a platform for disease modelling, cartilage specific OA biomarker detection, and therapeutic testing.

This will be achieved by using emerging cellular self-organisation strategies and developing Raman spectroscopy (RS) for real-time, non-destructive spatiotemporal evaluation of cartilage (de)generation.

The project is divided into 4 work packages over 3-years focusing on (1) Design and fabrication of cartilage on chip model (healthy and diseased) (2) Validation and bio mechanical characterisation of models (3) Development of RS analysis (4) High throughput therapeutic testing.

By employing an extensive, multimodal evaluation workflow, this project will provide unique insights into changes in composition, structure, and mechanics during AC degeneration.

This will create a ‘cartilage-on-chip’ platform spanning healthy and diseased cartilage to understand disease progression and accelerate in vitro therapeutic testing.