3D Organ-on-Chip: Cell Uptake Simulator

3D Organ-on-Chip

Flow rate 3.0 µL/min

Membrane permeability 50%

Drug dose (particles/s) 6

Circulating drug

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Cells saturated

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Avg. cell uptake

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Particles absorbed

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How it works

This is the same microfluidic organ-on-chip barrier as the 2D version, but modeled as discrete events instead of a continuum: individual drug particles are injected at the channel inlet and carried downstream by the flow. Each particle that crosses the porous membrane is captured by the epithelial cell directly beneath it, and that cell's own uptake accumulates — some cells saturate faster than others purely from where particles happen to cross, which a smooth diffusion gradient can't show.

P(cross membrane | pore below) = permeability · dt
cell.uptake += 1  on capture
color(cell) = lerp(healthy, saturated, uptake / capacity)

Flow rate — how fast particles travel through the channel; faster flow means less residence time for each particle to find a pore.
Membrane permeability — per-particle probability of crossing when a pore is present directly below it.
Drug dose — particle injection rate at the inlet.
Particles — toggle the flowing drug particles to see the bare chip and cell layer.

Real-world relevance: this particle/cell-level view is closer to what a fluorescent-tracer microscopy readout actually shows on a real organ-on-chip — patchy, cell-by-cell uptake — rather than the smooth average concentration a bulk assay reports.

Drug particle (blood) Membrane pore Cell — healthy Cell — saturated

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