Integrating Mechanical Sensor Readouts into Organ-on-a-chip Platforms

Organs-on-a-chip have emerged as next-generation tissue engineered models to accurately capture realistic human tissue behaviour, thereby addressing many of the challenges associated with using animal models in research. Mechanical features of the culture environment have emerged as being critically important in designing organs-on-a-chip, as they play important roles in both stimulating realistic tissue formation and function, as well as capturing integrative elements of homeostasis, tissue function, and tissue degeneration in response to external insult and injury. Despite the demonstrated impact of incorporating mechanical cues in these models, strategies to measure these mechanical tissue features in microfluidically-compatible formats directly on-chip are relatively limited. In this review, we first describe general microfluidically-compatible Organs-on-a-chip sensing strategies, and categorize these advances based on the specific advantages of incorporating them on-chip. We then consider foundational and recent advances in mechanical analysis techniques spanning cellular to tissue length scales; and discuss their integration into Organs-on-a-chips for more effective drug screening, disease modeling, and characterization of biological dynamics.