A fantastic day at Queen Mary's Festival of Communities talking about our organs-on-chips research. There was lots of interesting conversations and interactions with local people of all ages.

Our excellent team of demonstrators showed people real organ-chip models and discussed their usage in the development of new medicines. Visitors, particularly children, enjoyed being able to pipettte coloured liquid into the organ-chips and seeing real cells growing in an organ-chip visualised under a microscope.

For older visitor we were able to discuss the range of available organ-chips for testing the toxicity and efficacy of new medicines. Dr Joanne Nolan was able to talk about her work developing a organ-chip model of breast cancer bone metastasis as funded by CRUK and EPSRC. Dr Tim Hopkins explained his research funded by Versus Arthritis which is developing a human cartilage-synovium organ-chip for understanding osteoarthritis.

Dr Clare Thompson, from the Queen Mary+Emulate Organs-on-Chips Centre, and Dr Liisa Bowes, from the CREATE Bioprinting lab, organised the interactive stand linking in with Queen Mary's Centre for Predictive in vitro Models. They were supported by a team of post docs and PhD students working with Prof Martin Knight and others in Bioengineering in the School of Engineering and Materials Science.

Updated by: Martin Knight