Lymphoid-tissue-on-chip recapitulates human antibody responses in vitro

In the past decades, vaccine development has made great strides. Nevertheless, more often than not, vaccine candidates fail in advanced stages of development and clinical trials. A key reason is the poor predictive value of non-clinical in vivo and in vitro models, due to either species-specific differences in the immune response or insufficient reflection of physiological vaccine mechanisms. Reliable modeling of human adaptive immune responses is a prerequisite to understand processes leading to vaccine-induced protective immunization and to drive informed decisions in vaccine development pipelines. Here, we present a centrifugal microfluidics based organ-on-chip approach to generate an organotypic high density lymphoid tissue on-chip. The model enables long-term culture of lymphoid tissue and raised antigen-specific antibody responses against influenza vaccines even after four weeks on-chip. Antibody response of different magnitude and quality could be induced both by direct antigen exposure as well as by recruitment of antigen-presenting cells from the periphery. The model represents an attractive approach to evaluate the impact of the mode of antigen delivery on adaptive immune responses. Beyond applications in vaccine development, the lymphoid-tissue-on-chip provides a platform to study cellular interactions during homeostasis, immune responses and long-term impact of immunomodulators over several weeks.