Summary

Organ-on-chip technology will revolutionize the healthcare domain by offering new and ground breaking solutions to different industries and especially for regenerative medicine and medication. Organ-on-Chip In Development (ORCHID) will create a roadmap for organ-on-chip technology and the framework to build a network of relevant stakeholders. ORCHID will achieve this through 5 objectives:

• evaluation of the technology (state of the art and unmet needs)
• identification of ethical issues, establishing standards and identifying measures for regulatory implementation
• analysis of economic and societal impact, training and education
• developing a roadmap which will guide the required R&D efforts and
• raising awareness and building the ecosystem for organ-on-chip technology through a digital reference platform.

ORCHID will have a broad impact: it will facilitate drug development, contribute significantly to reducing animal experiments and help in developing personalized medicine. ORCHID will achieve these goals by providing a framework to the main stakeholders, bringing together key players and raising awareness on organ-on-chip technology throughout Europe. The digital platform will gather all information on existing and new initiatives in the field. In this way ORCHID as a whole will secure and reinforce Europe’s leadership on organ-on-chip. The consortium is composed of the main contributors to the field who are all very experienced and who will strongly collaborate with each other. Leiden University Medical Centrum (LUMC) will lead the consortium, the Institute for human Organ and Disease model (hDMT) will focus on the strategy and the roadmap, Fraunhofer IGB on impact assessment, CEA Leti on eco-system development and the digital platform, IMEC on the ethical aspects, regulation and standardization and the University of Zaragoza will lead dissemination. ORCHID will install an Advisory Board composed of complementary specialists in the field.

Organ-on-chip: a Future Emerging Technology

Organs-on-chips will radically change the way and the speed at which drugs can be implemented clinically, not only for general drug development but also for personalised drugs. This is not only key for making drug and cosmetic development test-animalfree, but the accuracy and speed with which outcomes can be evaluated will surpass standard cell cultures and laboratory animals that presently capture human physiology and response on drugs imperfectly.

Organ-on-chip technology is cutting-edge science, which goes beyond the frontiers of knowledge and requires multidisciplinary collaboration. hDMT, one of the partners of this consortium, has submitted a FET Flagship proposal for this technology with a broad support from European research centres and is actively working with other regenerative medicine proposals to settle a broad EU flagship. Partners are European leaders in their specialist area but their collaboration is essential to realize the potential of this emerging technology.

The main goal of this CSA is to create a roadmap for organ-on-chip technology and to build a network of academia, research institutes, industry, and regulatory bodies to move organ-on-chip technology from promise in the laboratory into reality for the citizens of the Europe and the rest of the world.