Organs-on-Chip Designer

Organs-on-Chips (OoCs) are testing platforms for the pharmaceutical, cosmetic, and chemical industries. They are composed of miniaturized organ tissues (so-called organ modules) that are connected via a microfluidic channel network and, by this, emulate human or other animal physiology on a miniaturized chip.

The design of those chips, however, requires a sophisticated orchestration of numerous aspects, such as the size of organ modules, the required shear stress on membranes, the dimensions and geometry of channels, pump pressures, etc. These are used to define an initial design. This can then be translated to a 2D network as well as extruded and exported as a 3D geometry of the microfluidic channel network for subsequent simulations or the desired device, including the chip specifications for fabrication.

In our paper “Automated Design for Multiorgan-on-Chip Geometries”, we extend the initial design method described in our previous paper by extending the export functionalities and introducing a Jupyter Notebook to improve usability.

More on our work on microfluidics is summarized in this page.

How to cite

If you use the implementation for your research, we would be thankful if you referred to it by citing the following publication:

@article{emmerich_automated_2025,
    title         = {{Automated Design for Multiorgan-on-Chip Geometries}},
    volume        = {44},
    pages         = {2287--2299},
    number        = {6},
    journal       = {IEEE Trans. on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems},
    author        = {Emmerich, Maria and Ebner, Philipp and Wille, Robert},
    year          = {2025},
}

which is part of the Munich Microfluidics Toolkit, described in the following publication:

@INPROCEEDINGS{iccad_2025_mmft,
    AUTHOR        = {R. Wille and P. Ebner and M. Emmerich and M. Takken},
    TITLE         = {{The Munich Microfluidics Toolkit: Design Automation and Simulation Tools for Microfluidic Devices}},
    BOOKTITLE     = {International Conference on Computer Aided Design (ICCAD)},
    YEAR          = {2025},
    ADDENDUM      = {A overview of the toolkit is available at \url{https://www.cda.cit.tum.de/research/microfluidics/mmft/}},
}