Engineering human organs onto a microchip | Dan Huh | TEDxPenn

High costs, animal testing controversies, and long delays of drug development are becoming some of the greatest economical and ethnical challenges we are facing in the 21st century. Dan Huh talks about how bioengineers might be able to circumvent this long-standing problem by using microengineering technologies to build more realistic models of human organs using organ-on-a-chip technology. As a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute, Dan Huh worked with Donald Ingber to develop the first organs-on-chips using microengineering technologies for cell biology. These microchips served as models of human organs. Dan Huh is now a professor in the Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania. Dan Huh has authored over 30 papers in Science, Nature, Nature Materials, PNAS, and other major research journals. He has won several honors and awards including the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, which grants innovators $1.5 million during the next five years to work on groundbreaking technologies. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx