But have you heard of Eroom’s law? This trend shows that R&D costs per drug approved roughly doubled every ~nine years between 1950 and 2010.1 This, added to the fact that today’s drug candidates are more likely to fail in clinical trials than those in the 1970s2, goes to show how difficult bringing a new drug to the market can be. Different reasons have been put forth explaining the high failure rate, one of them being that preclinical models might not reflect properly the human drug response.

This is why a lot of hope has been placed on organs-on-chips (OOCs) as more complex and predictive in vitro models that can better recapitulate the human drug response. It is however a daunting task, and might be a lot to ask from them. Now that OOCs have been around for close to a decade, it is worth asking whether they can live up to expectations, and in particular, whether they can do it alone.