Multi-Organ Chip: Liver First-Pass Cascade

Real organ-on-chip drug testing rarely uses a single chamber — pharmaceutical labs link a hepatocyte "liver-chip" upstream of a target-organ chip to reproduce first-pass metabolism, the same filtering effect the liver applies to an orally absorbed drug before it reaches systemic circulation. This simulator models both chambers as perfused, well-mixed compartments: inject a bolus dose into the liver chamber, where saturable Michaelis–Menten enzyme kinetics (V_max, K_m) metabolize part of the drug, and watch the surviving fraction perfuse downstream into the target chamber at flow rate Q. Live readouts track both chamber concentrations and the cumulative bioavailability reaching the target organ — the same hepatic-extraction figure real microphysiological systems are built to measure.