Can the essential functions of the human body’s major organs be replicated in a series of flexible plastic chips, each about the size of a thumb drive? That’s the goal announced today by the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, a nifty collection of labs started by Harvard University. The Wyss researchers have been making rapid progress on “organ-on-a-chip” technology, and today announced that DARPA will give them up to US $37 million to link 10 organ-chips together to mimic the whole human body.
