Applications: life sciences

Skin-on-a-chip

The skin is the largest organ of the body, typically making up 15%–20% of total body weight, with an external surface area of 1.8 m² in adults. Its main functions are sensory, thermoregulatory, metabolic, and protective.

skin-on-a-chip is a specific kind of Organ-on-a-chip, where the aim is to replicate the physiological mechanisms of growth and formation of skin cells and tissues.

Static cellular cultures with human skin cells are well-known procedures in the biocosmetic and pharmaceutical industry.

However, maintaining a culture with the right conditions of manually added nutrients, supplements, stimuli or toxins implies higher costs, since more qualified personnel, more working time and a larger amount of culture medium, reagents and lab consumables are needed. It also entails more imprecision and contamination  probabilities and does not mimic with enough accuracy the cell functioning in the human body.

At B5tec

Skin-on-a-chip has been implemented

  • Microfluidic devices, sensors and actuators

    A Skin-on-a-chip has been implemented using our microfluidic devices, sensors and actuators and incorporates specific modifications for skin cell growth.

  • Simplify the transition

    Given that static skin cell cultures are common in industry and research, we wanted to simplify the transition into an automated dynamic system.

  • Reactor

    To do so, a reactor that incorporates standardized commercial transwells has been designed. By maintaining some of the more traditional elements, the transition for researchers and technicians to automated systems is smoother, while incorporating the technological advances that allow for more precise science.

The skin-on-a-chip developed and used by B5tec starts from human skin cells.

The system is designed to favor cell proliferation and differentiation. The dynamic and automated system incorporates measurements of the most important cellular metabolism indicators, allowing for better control of cellular growth. The culture medium flows continuously underneath the transwell, allowing the cells to obtain homogeneous nutrition. In static cultures, changing the culture medium implies stressing the cells, while with a dynamic system, the medium can be gradually changed using the microhydraulic system.  

The transition from a static skin cell culture into a Skin-on-a-Chip

entails numerous benefits

The integrated sensors and actuators allow for life monitoring of cellular growth

Minimizing the need for direct interaction with the cells

Favouring cellular growth and experimental accuracy.

One of the features that has been successfully implemented is the possibility to grow a 3D cellular culture where the interaction between dermis and epidermis can be studied. The SoC can also be used to study the growth and differentiation of skin cells starting from a monolayer. This allows to grow the external layers of the epidermis and to study them. 

Skin-on-a-chip is a revolution for the biocosmetic and pharmaceutical industries, and what makes it possible are precise and reliable micro-scale sensors and actuators.

Do you need further informacion?

contact us

Scroll to Top