Recently, China's first national standard in the field of organ chips, “General Technical Requirements for Skin Chips” (GB/T 44831-2024), was officially released. This marks an important step in the field of organ chip standardization in China, and is of great significance for promoting the standardization and standardized development of scientific research and industrial applications in this field.On November 3, a reporter from Science and Technology Daily was informed by Southeast University that the team of Gu Zhongze, director of the university's Suzhou Institute of Medical Devices, took the lead in completing the drafting of the standard.
“Skin chip is a miniature cell and tissue culture device that can mimic the biochemical and physiological properties of the skin, with barrier structure and function, generated using an in vitro microfluidic chip.” Gu Zhongze introduced that skin chips can realize high-throughput and automated culture and detection, and are expected to become an effective tool for toxicology testing, drug screening, and cosmetic evaluation, and are expected to supplement as well as partially replace the existing standards for simple two-dimensional cell culture experiments, animal experiments, and even artificial skin experiments, and to become the most cutting-edge and potent evaluation standard and experimental tool for skin-related in vitro evaluations.
The General Technical Requirements for Skin Microarrays released this time was drafted by the team led by Gu Zhongze, with the cooperation of 21 units including Southeast University, Boao Bio Group Co. Ltd, Jiangsu Ai Wei De Bio-technology Co. Ltd, Tsinghua University, Nanfang Medical University, Nanjing Institute of Food and Drug Supervision and Inspection, and Nanjing Metrology Supervision and Inspection Institute.
The standard mainly stipulates the definition of relevant terms of skin chip, the appearance of skin chip, cell source, component performance, biological performance of the technical requirements, applicable to microfluidic chip as the carrier of the design, production and testing of skin chip products. The release of this standard will effectively promote the industry standardization and empower the high-quality development of the industry.
Skin chip is a kind of human organ chip. Gu Zhongze introduction, the human organ chip is through stem cells, biomaterials, nano-processing and other cutting-edge technologies of cross-integration, in vitro construction of organ micro-physiological systems, can simulate the main structural and functional characteristics of different tissues and organs of the human body and the complex inter-organ connection, used to predict the human body's response to different stimuli of the drug or the outside world.
Currently, Gu's team has broken through the scientific and technological bottlenecks in the field of human organ chips, such as microstructure-induced tissue/organ growth, cross-scale structurally controllable fabrication of organ chips and biosensors, and multimodal in-situ/online measurements of organ chips, and has formed a complete technological system of organ chips. The team has also successfully constructed China's first organ chip model to enter the space station and implement scientific experiments, taken the lead in the international arena in proposing a drug screening paradigm that integrates organ chips and artificial intelligence, and jointly released the world's first large model of human organ chips for medicine with Huawei, and the related achievements have been honored with China's Top Ten Advances in Life Sciences, China Patent Award, and the Huang Jiaqi Prize for Biomedical Engineering, among other honors.
