Advances in skin-on-a-chip and skin tissue engineering

Development of physiologically relevant in vitro skin models that allow for collecting reliable and efficient data can help us better understand the human skin and address the current challenges in drug development and screening. In this chapter, we present an overview of the current state-of-the-art in tissue-engineered skin and skin-on-a-chip technologies. These advanced systems can be used to recapitulate the physiology of healthy and diseased human skin, and to carry out pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic studies. As technology progresses and engineered human skin constructs continue to reach higher levels of complexity, they can provide strong alternatives to and eventually replace animal studies. Besides the advantage of addressing the ethical concerns on animal welfare, the skin of small animals (e.g., rodents) only partially resembles that of humans. Therefore, physiologically relevant skin models and skin chips have the potential to be the gold standard in skin research in the near future.