A research team led by Professor Seongyun Jeon of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, in collaboration with Professor Gi-Dong Sim’s team from the same department and Professor Sejoong Kim of Seoul National University Hospital, has developed a biomicrofluidic system that can recreate, in the laboratory, the process by which drug-induced muscle damage leads to kidney injury.

This research, with Jaesang Kim participating as the first author, was published in Advanced Functional Materials.

How the organ-on-a-chip system works

The study is particularly significant in that it is the first to precisely reproduce, in a laboratory environment, the cascade of inter-organ reactions in which drug-induced muscle injury leads to kidney damage, using a modular (assembly-type) organ-on-a-chip platform that allows muscle and kidney tissues to be both connected and separated.