During the 46th Annual ESAO (European Society for Artificial Organs) Congress on ‘Smartificial Devices for our Future’ in Hannover from 3-7 September 2019 Organ-on-Chip was introduced as a new topic in the field of the European Society for Artificial Organs.

The symposium EUROoCS@ESAO was a joint effort of EUROoCS and ESAO to promote exchange between Organ-on-Chip researchers working at the microscale and those involved in artificial or bioartificial organs at the macroscale of the human organ. The symposium was chaired by Cécile Legallais from CNRS (France), president of ESAO, and Janny van den Eijnden-van Raaij, board member of EUROoCS. After a short introduction about Organ-on-Chip, ORCHID and EUROoCS  five speakers presented their latest research results.

Eric Leclerc (CNRS, Japan) gave a keynote lecture about the development of a liver-pancreas Organ-on-Chip coculture model to simulate the interaction between both organs. Other topics included retina-on-chip (Christopher Probst (Fraunhofer IGB, Germany)), a blood vessel model for genetic vascular diseases (Valeria Orlova, LUMC, the Netherlands) and models that recapitulate the lung alveolar microenvironment (Olivier Guenat, ARTORG, Switzerland). Jari Hyttinen (Tampere University, Finland) addressed the power of combined in vitro and in silico models for future precision medicine.

Altogether it was very useful for both societies to learn from each other and to explore the common interests and possibilities to benefit from their mutual expertise in further research towards a better health for all.

Cécile Legallais and Janny van den Eijnden-van Raaij at the EUROoCS@ESAO symposium.