At a health-technology showcase during the World Health Expo 2026 at Expo City Dubai, UAE regulators and industry researchers presented an organ-on-a-chip device, a rapidly emerging laboratory platform designed to mimic how real human organs behave. The demonstration, coordinated with the Emirates Drug Establishment (EDE), signals the country’s attempt to move drug testing and biomedical research toward more human-relevant models and reduced reliance on animal experiments.
Organ-on-chip devices are small, transparent microfluidic platforms, typically the size of a microscope slide, etched with tiny channels through which fluids circulate. These channels act like miniature blood vessels, allowing nutrients, oxygen and biochemical signals to flow across living human cells grown inside the device.
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Researchers seed the chips with organ-specific human cells—often derived from primary tissue or stem cells—which assemble into three-dimensional tissue structures. A thin porous membrane separates compartments inside the chip: one side may contain organ-tissue cells, while the other contains vascular endothelial cells that mimic blood-vessel linings. Continuous fluid flow, pressure changes, oxygen gradients and even mechanical stretching recreate aspects of the physical environment inside a living body.
In effect, the device attempts to reproduce the microenvironment of an organ or the local biological and mechanical conditions that determine how cells actually function.
Why scientists are pursuing it
Pre-clinical drug testing today largely relies on two models: Flat cell cultures grown in petri dishes and animal experiments. Both have limitations. Two-dimensional cultures lack realistic tissue structure and circulation, while animal physiology often differs from that of humans. A significant proportion of medicines that appear effective and safe in animals later fail in human clinical trials, mainly because toxicity or metabolism behaves differently in people.
Organ-on-chip systems aim to bridge this gap by enabling researchers to observe how human tissues respond to drugs before clinical trials. Scientists can monitor inflammation, toxicity, metabolism and drug absorption in real time.
Researchers say the technology could allow more predictive safety and efficacy screening of medicines, modelling of diseases such as cancer or chronic inflammatory conditions, patient-specific testing using an individual’s own cells, and reduced use of laboratory animals.
Multiple devices can also be connected to create so-called “body-on-a-chip” systems, where, for example, a liver chip metabolises a drug and the resulting compounds then affect a heart or tumour chip. This begins to approximate how different organs interact in a real human body.
Regulatory and industry interest
The EDE presentation emphasised pre-clinical evaluation—the stage before medicines are approved for human trials and eventual manufacturing. Globally, regulators including the US Food and Drug Administration and European agencies have begun evaluating how such platforms could supplement conventional toxicity testing, though they do not yet replace clinical trials.
Companies exhibiting at the event included international manufacturers developing AI-assisted analysis of chip-generated biological data. These systems use machine-learning models to interpret cell responses, but claims of very high predictive accuracy remain experimental and vary by disease type and organ model.
Why it is important for the UAE
For the UAE, the showcase forms part of a broader effort to build domestic biomedical regulation and pharmaceutical innovation capacity, aligning with international trends toward ethical testing and precision medicine.
The country is working towards a more self-reliant healthcare ecosystem. By adopting organ-on-chip (OoC) technology, the Emirates Drug Establishment appears to be aiming to strengthen local drug-development capabilities and reduce dependence on foreign pre-clinical data. It would allow testing of drug efficacy and toxicity locally using laboratory models that could, in principle, be adapted to reflect regional genetic and physiological characteristics.
The system is also being discussed within the framework of “Project Falcon” (Future of AI, Lab Automation, and Organ Chips for Onward Innovation in Medicine). By combining these chips with AI-assisted laboratory automation, researchers could simulate drug–human interactions at greater scale and speed. This convergence may help shorten early research timelines for new therapies while contributing to the UAE’s ambition to develop advanced regulatory and biomedical research capacity.
The initiative also aligns with the UAE’s push to upgrade the national pharmaceutical system, encourage specialised research and development within the country, and promote innovative solutions aimed at building an advanced and sustainable pharmaceutical ecosystem.