Electroacoustic responsive cochlea-on-a-chip.

Organ-on-chips can highly simulate the complex physiological functions of organs, exhibiting broad application prospects in developmental research, disease simulation, as well as new drug research and development. However, there is still less concern about effectively constructing cochlea-on-chips. Here, we present a novel cochlear organoids integrated conductive hydrogel biohybrid system with cochlear implant electroacoustic stimulation (EAS) for cochlea-on-a-chip construction and high-throughput drug screening. Benefiting from the superior biocompatibility and electrical property of conductive hydrogel, together with cochlear implant electroacoustic stimulation, the inner ear progenitor cells can proliferate and spontaneously shape into spheres, finally forming cochlear organoids with good cell viability and structurally mature hair cells. By incorporating these progenitor cells encapsulated hydrogels into a microfluidic-based cochlea-on-a-chip with culture chambers and a concentration gradient generator, we have demonstrated a dynamic and high-throughput evaluation of inner ear disease-related drugs. These results indicated that the proposed cochlea-on-a-chip platform has great application potential in organoid cultivation and deafness drug evaluation. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.