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Our science made simple

At the Fleischer Lab, we engineer miniature human tissues to study disease and develop better treatments. But you don't need a science degree to understand what we do — or why it matters. Here's our research, explained simply.

What Are Organs-On-Chip?

What are
Organs-on-a-chip

Organs-on-a-chip are tiny devices - roughly the size of a USB drive - containing living human cells engineered to replicate the structure and function of real organs. Unlike traditional cells grown flat in a dish, these chips create a three-dimensional environment that closely mimics what cells actually experience inside the human body: the right mechanical forces, fluid flow, and cell-to-cell interactions. The result is a miniature, living model of a human organ that behaves remarkably like the real thing. These platforms are transforming how we study disease and develop treatments - offering a uniquely human, patient-specific window into biology that animal models simply cannot provide, including the ability to test how a specific patient's own tissue responds to a given drug, right on the chip.

Engineering the Human Heart

Engineering the human heart

The heart is one of the most complex - and hardest to study - organs in the human body. At the Fleischer Lab, we grow real human heart cells on specially designed chips that recreate the mechanical and electrical environment of a beating heart. These engineered tissues contract, respond to drugs, and display signs of disease, just like a real heart would.
To do this, we use a platform we call milliPillar: a chip containing pairs of tiny flexible posts that the heart tissue grips and pulls against as it beats - mimicking the physical tension a real heart muscle experiences with every contraction. As the tissue squeezes, we measure exactly how much the posts bend. We then use BeatProfiler, a custom machine learning tool that analyzes thousands of heartbeats at once - identifying disease signatures and drug responses with striking accuracy.
By studying heart tissue at the microscale, we uncover insights that would be nearly impossible to get any other way. The ultimate goal? To accelerate better treatments for heart disease - still one of the leading causes of death worldwide.

Understanding heart disease in lupus patients

Lupus is an autoimmune disease affecting millions of people globally - and one of its most serious and least understood complications is heart disease. At the Fleischer Lab, we engineer miniature heart tissues using stem cells derived directly from lupus patients - capturing both the patient's unique biology and the precision of organ-on-a-chip technology in a single model. This allows us to watch the disease unfold in living human tissue, in real time, and has already led to a striking discovery published in Nature Cardiovascular Research: proteins produced by the patients' own immune system can independently attack heart tissue, and patients with different cardiac complications do so through distinct mechanisms. By tracking how these patient-derived engineered tissues develop, contract, and respond over time, we're working toward something that matters enormously to patients: understanding why lupus attacks the heart, and finding new ways to stop it.

Heart Disease in SLE Patients
Controling Organs-On-Chip by Light

Controlling organs-on-a-chip with light

What if you could control living cells with a flash of light? That's exactly what optogenetics allows us to do. By introducing light-sensitive proteins into cells, we can switch biological processes on and off with precise pulses of light - no needles, no chemicals, no physical contact. This approach was applied to one of the body's most critical barriers: the inner lining of blood vessels, which tightly controls what passes from the bloodstream into surrounding tissues. Using a platform called optoBarrier, this barrier can be opened and closed on demand, in a fully tunable and reversible way, simply by shining light. This opens new doors both for modeling vascular diseases and for exploring how to deliver drugs more effectively across vessel walls - a longstanding challenge in medicine.

© 2026 Fleischer Lab

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