On 7 May, this year’s MS Wissenschaft was officially launched in cooperation with the Federal Ministry for Research, Technology and Space. The exhibition focuses on emergingtechnologies that are shaping the future of healthcare, including approaches that enable more precise, human-relevant, and personalized medicine. The focus is on making research accessible in a playful way and demonstrating how biomedical innovations are already being applied today.
Among the many projects on board is a contribution from the 3R-Center in Tübingen.
At the heart of the exhibit is a Heart-on-Chip, a miniature heart on a microfluidic chip. The model illustrates how complex organ functions can be recreated in an artificial environment. Visitors first assemble a chip themselves, learning about its individual layers. Afterwards, they test drugs directly on the heart tissue and observe their effects on the cells in culture as well as on the real human heart. This hands-on experience highlights the potential of Organ-on-Chip technology: it replicates human organ functions realistically in the lab and brings research closer to the human body. The technology enables:
- more human-relevant science,
- reduces animal testing,
- and opens new perspectives for personalized medicine.
Drug candidates can be evaluated under conditions that more closely resemble the human body than many traditional models.
The potential of such systems becomes clear in a recent research example. A retina chip developed in the MicroOrganoLab was combined with human retinal organoids to evaluate theeffectiveness of a gene therapy for the rare inherited childhood dementia CLN2 (Batten disease). In this model, the characteristic retinal damage associated with the disease was significantly reduced—without the use of animal experiments. These findings demonstrate how Organ-on-Chip systems can accelerate preclinical development and smooth thetransition to clinical applications.
Come by and experience the exhibit yourself!
More information & tour schedule: https://ms-wissenschaft.de/de/besuch/tour/
Many thanks to the 3R‑Center Tübingen team and the MicroOrganoLab (NMI Natural and Medical Sciences Institute at the University of Tübingen) for the excellent development and realization of the exhibit.
The MS Wissenschaft is organized by Wissenschaft im Dialog on behalf of the Federal Ministry for Research, Technology and Space.
