Module 1: Design, Development & Use of Organ-Chip Technology

This module takes place at the start of Year 1 and is designed to deliver the core technical skills including understanding of key organ-chip topics and practical skills. It consists of hands-on exercises and case studies, many led directly by our industry partners.

Core technical skills, will cover topics such as how to work with commercially available chip designs, how to design and print custom organ-chip devices, working with cell cultures, microfabrication of 3D chip environments, managing biochemical/physical chip stimuli, microfluidics, instrumentation and biosensing, nano-patterning, and in silico modelling. Students will be taught how to design and run appropriate chip experiments and analyse resulting data. 

Quality Control & Industrial Manufacturing will introduce GLP, GCP & GMP requirements in industry settings. It will also cover the quality control requirements to evaluate materials, finished products, packaging, storage conditions and labelling which drive industrial settings.

As part of this module, students will engage in two residential winter schools. One of these will position organ-chip approaches in the industrial landscape and explore how market need shapes the sector, using case studies to explore how commercial organ-chip platforms adopt different technology and market approaches. Building on this, we will introduce the group projects, with each group looking to tackle one of the current major model development challenges the sector is currently facing. The second winter school will build on the project with a drug discovery pipeline exercise delivered by the Medicines Discovery Catapult, in which students consider practical uses of their models. They will learn each step of the drug discovery pipeline and simulate the decision making required in target discovery, scale-up and manufacturing, with tight deadlines and changing information introduced during the exercise.