Olivier Guenat is Full Professor at the University of Bern and heads the Organs-on-Chip Technologies group at the ARTORG Center for Biomedical Engineering Research. Trained as a microengineer and physicist at the Institute of Microtechnology in Neuchâtel, where he completed his PhD on microsystems for cell analysis, he moved into bioengineering during a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, and held a faculty position in the Engineering Physics Department at Ecole Polytechnique Montréal. He then joined the Swiss Center for Electronics and Microtechnology (CSEM), where he built up a research group at the interface of cell biology and engineering within the newly created Nanomedicine Division, initially holding a joint appointment between CSEM and the University of Bern before moving to Bern full time in 2010.
His group develops in vitro models of the lung, combining custom microinstrumentation with advanced cell culture to reproduce the physical environment of lung tissue. The work spans microfabrication and device design through to models of pulmonary fibrosis, hypertension and acute lung injury using patient-derived cells. Technology from the group has been transferred to industry through two spin-offs: AlveoliX AG, which he founded in 2015, and Vitronco AG, which he co-founded in 2026.
These microengineered systems make it possible to add or remove individual parameters of the cellular environment and measure their separate contribution to tissue response, with the aim of in vitro models that are quantitative and clinically predictive enough to inform treatment decisions for individual patients.
