23 May, 2018
On 23 May 2018 31 experts from 14 countries, representing academia, industry, regulatory bodies and medical centers, met in a welcoming atmosphere at Fraunhofer IGB in Stuttgart during a workshop of the ORCHID (Organ-on-Chip In Development) project. The purpose of this invitational Vision workshop was to define the ingredients of the European organ-on-chip roadmap. The workshop was organized by Janny van den Eijnden-van Raaij from hDMT (work package leader Roadmap) and chaired by Christine Mummery from LUMC (coordinator).
As a basis for the afternoon discussions the workshop started with an overview of the results of a bibliometric study, a market analysis and interviews with 17 key international players in the field of organ-on-chip technology, carried out by Massimo Mastrangeli (TU Delft, the Netherlands) and Sylvie Millet (CEA, France). In addition, first results of a study on the economic impact of this technology were presented by Nora Franzen (UTwente/NKI, the Netherlands).
In the afternoon there were three sessions, each led and reported by ORCHID team members, with lively discussions about the following topics:
(1) prioritizing the needs and applications;
(2) technological challenges;
(3) qualification and validation of the organ-on-chip models.
At the end of the workshop the participants got a little glimpse of the digital platform on organ-on-chip that is being developed now within ORCHID. The report of the ORCHID Vision workshop will be publicly available in October this year. The workshop has been a great impulse to strengthen the organ-on-chip community in Europe further and to stimulate collaborations between the many disciplines that are involved in this interesting and innovative field.
EUROoc
The ORCHID Vision workshop was followed by the EUROoC workshop in Stuttgart on 24 and 25 May 2018. The latter workshop was organized by Peter Loskill (Fraunhofer IGB), Maria Tenje (Univ. Uppsala, Sweden), Torsten Mayr (Techn. Univ. Graz, Austria) and Alexander Mosig (Jena Univ. Hospital, Germany). During a poster session of this workshop the ORCHID project, including the growing organ-on-chip network in Europe, was presented by hDMT. The next EUROoC conference will be held at the Technical University in Graz (Austria) on 1 and 2 July 2019.