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About

Rachelle Prantil-Baun is a pioneering biomedical engineer whose work sits at the intersection of microfluidics, tissue engineering, and preclinical drug development. She is best known for her instrumental role in advancing the “body-on-chips” paradigm, creating vascularized organ chips that can be fluidically coupled to model systemic human physiology. Her landmark 2020 paper, “Quantitative prediction of human pharmacokinetic responses to drugs via fluidically coupled vascularized organ chips,” has garnered over 460 citations, demonstrating its profound impact on replacing animal models with human-relevant platforms. In a companion study cited over 400 times, she introduced robotic fluidic coupling to enable automated interrogation of multiple organ chips simultaneously. Prantil-Baun also co-developed the “Interrogator” robotic platform, a liquid-handling system that automates culture, perfusion, and in situ imaging of up to ten Organ Chips, drastically increasing experimental throughput. Her work has been central to the Wyss Institute’s mission at Harvard, where she has helped translate organ-on-chip technology from proof-of-concept to a robust, scalable tool for predicting human pharmacokinetic responses.