A team of scientists are working to develop miniaturehuman body parts on a series of plastic chips connected to each other.

The team is creating the miniature version of human organs by growing tiny working organs onthse chips that are linked to each other. The team is working to create a 'body on a chip' to mimic the way the human body works. The scientists have already developed tiny lungs, guts and livers on the chips. The study was funded by the US Department of Defense and National Institutes of Health.

A group at Harvard University's Wyss Institute in Boston is adapting 'bone marrow on a chip' in order to study the effects of radiation. The team believes that all these organs can be connected together to mimic real biological systems and even the entire human body.

Another project backed by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) is aiming to link ten or more organs together. Tehagnecy said that this can be used to develop countermeasures against biological and chemical attacks, along with new drugs and vaccines.

The agency said, "The resulting platform should increase the quality and potentially the number of novel therapies that move through the pipeline and into clinical care."