Microfluidic Biotechnology for “Bone‐on‐a‐Chip”

Microfluidics has become an indispensable technology at the intersection of physics, chemistry, biology, and engineering. With the capability to precisely control a small amount of fluid on a miniaturized and biocompatible platform, it is considered the new paradigm of bioanalytics, allowing complex analyses in a high-throughput manner. More recently, the field of bioengineering has embraced the microfluidic technology to develop "organ-on-a-chip," integrating engineered biological tissues representing various organs within a microfluidic platform in order to understand various biological phenomena at a tissue level. Naturally, enormous research efforts are underway to develop "bone-on-a-chip," as it would greatly help understand the physiology on bone that is inherently complex and heterogeneous. In this chapter, the key concepts and examples of microfluidic "bone-on-a-chip" technology are introduced.