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PERSPECTIVE article
Front. Bioeng. Biotechnol.
Sec. Organoids and Organ-On-A-Chip
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fbioe.2025.1497060
This article is part of the Research Topic Insights In Organoids and Organ-On-A-Chip 2024: Novel Developments, Current Challenges and Future Perspectives View all 7 articles
Bioengineering ethics for the age of microphysiological systems
Provisionally accepted- 1 University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway
- 2 Centre for Medical Ethics, Department of Health and Society, Faculty of Medicine, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway
The development of microphysiological systems (MPS) is pushing ethical standards in biomedical research to a breaking point. This article argues that only an original perspective drawing from engineering ethics will be able to address the new challenges raised by organoids and organs-on-chips. Extending progressively the scope of moral commitment, we discuss successively the following areas. (i) Individual consent: When cell lines are generated and human biomaterial circulates and is incorporated into biotechnologies whose lifecycle will far exceed the scope envisioned by donors and manufacturers, the classic notion of informed consent becomes almost obsolete, or at least has to be taken up afresh. (ii) Collective deliberation: MPS raise many expectations for animal replacement and the advancement of precision and regenerative medicine. The management of prospects by different stakeholders and for everyone is itself an ethical challenge at the interface of science and society. (iii) Consideration for novel entities: Some complex microphysiological systems might be endowed a moral status in the near future, and this will have an impact on how researchers treat them and work with them.
Keywords: Informed Consent, Moral status, precision medicine, biobanking, Ethics-by-design
Received: 16 Sep 2024; Accepted: 04 Mar 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Gaillard. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Maxence Gaillard, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway
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