In recent years, liver disease has been one of the most important cause of death, such as liver cancer, cirrhosis, etc. It is believed that there is correlation with dining culture and lifestyle. Many liver diseases are very hard to heal completely. For this reason, many medical research teams and association are working on the issues engineering related to liver disease.
Liver is an important organ in the human body. It can metabolize toxins inside the body and resist bacterial invasion into our body. Therefore, a variety of physiological functions can be operated normally. If the lesions occur in the liver, it will result in impair of many physiological functions. There are two major problems for the studies of liver-related disease. (a) It is hard to monitor the human liver disease inside the human body in real-time. (b) It is hard to test the drug in human body because it would get many legal and ethical problems. Therefore, there are many people trying to mimic the real liver in vitro. It is easy to observe and study the effects of new drugs and their development. Thus liver tissue is extremely complex and performs over hundreds of functions. It is our goal to mimic the real liver tissue in this research.
This research takes advantage of technology of BioMEMS (Bio MicroElectroMechanical Systems) and microfluidic chip technique to mimic the liver tissue structure, the metabolism mechanism and the blood capillary. By this approach, we develop a functional-liver-tissue-mimicking system in vitro. There are few researches which apply the blood capillary mechanism for on-organ reconstruction. This liver-chip research integrates some of the features and mechanisms of microvascular tubules. I wish that this research will bring a different perception.

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