Researchers from A*STAR’s Singapore Institute of Manufacturing Technology (SIMTech) have successfully reconstructed human skin on a device which can reduce or eventually replace animal testing. The credit-card sized device was created by a multidisciplinary team, led by Wang Ziping from the A*STAR SIMTech and Paul Bigliardi from the A*STAR Institute of Medical Biology (IMB). The device, dubbed the skin-on-a-chip, works based on microuidics, can process small quantities of uids at a microscale.

This makes the device even more capable of mimicking the structure functionalities and microenvironment of human skin compared to static skin cultures.

According to the researchers, this allows the testing of skin care products for absorption, safety, and permeability. “The skin reconstructed in the microuidic system exhibited enhanced maturation of the epidermis, and almost twice the epidermal thickness of standard skin equivalents,” said Zee Upton, Covering Executive Director of A*STAR’s IMB.

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