The AlveoliX lung-on-chip system: the carrier plate with its chips, the tubing that breathes them, and the control software

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Alveolix

A lung that breathes, on a plate a pharma lab can actually use

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Challenge

A hundred and thirty years after the petri dish, cells were still being grown in a medium nothing like the body they came from - and they behave accordingly. Nine out of ten drug candidates fail the first time they are tested in humans, after passing cell culture and animal testing, because the models they passed were not predictive. At the ARTORG Center in Bern, Olivier Guenat's group had answered that with a chip: an ultra-thin porous membrane carrying human lung cells, air on one side and a blood-like medium on the other, stretched in the rhythm of breathing. It worked. It was also a laboratory prototype, and a prototype is not something a pharmaceutical company can buy, run and trust.

  • The membrane under the electron microscope - porous, and thinner than anything a culture insert offers
  • Air above, blood-like medium below, and a diaphragm that moves the cells in the rhythm of breathing

Solution

Creaholic's part was the instrument around the science. The chip stayed AlveoliX's; what had to be built was everything that turns it into a product: a carrier plate holding twelve chips in the standard microtiter footprint every lab already owns, the ventilator that drives the breathing motion, and the control software that runs it. Alongside that came the work of making the thing manufacturable - a CTI-funded project to take a hand-built prototype to industrial production. The design brief was Guenat's own: as close to the body as necessary, as simple as possible.

  • The instrument that drives the breathing motion, with its own interface
  • Running a plate: the control software decides frequency, amplitude and duration
  • The AX12 plate - twelve chips in the microtiter footprint every lab already has
  • Loading a plate. Standard format was a design requirement, not a detail

Results

The system launched, and the company grew past the lung it was named for. AlveoliX now sells the AX12 plate - twelve independent alveolar units, so twelve replicates per experiment - with lung, gut, liver, kidney, brain and barrier models on the same platform, and a membrane 3.5 µm thick where a conventional insert is 10–12. It won the Swiss Medtech Award in 2022, whose jury called it a candidate to become the new standard in preclinical drug development. The work behind it keeps appearing in Science Advances, Biofabrication and Archives of Toxicology, and the platform is in use at the Francis Crick Institute, CHUV and Vitrocell among others.

  • Human lung cells on the chip, under fluorescence
  • The same platform, grown into a gut model
  • In the lab: the chip goes under an ordinary microscope, like any other plate

At a glance

Founded
2015 · spin-off of the ARTORG Center, University of Bern
Creaholic's part
Carrier plate, ventilator and control software - the system around the chip
Awards
Swiss Medtech Award 2022 (CHF 75,000) · Swiss Technology Award finalist 2025
Site
alveolix.com

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What clients say

Our motto is to keep our product as close to the body as necessary, but also as simple as possible.
Olivier GuenatBiomedical engineer, ARTORG Center, University of Bern