| 研究実績の概要 |
AIMS: This two-year JSPS postdoctoral fellowship (FY2014-2016) aims at fabricating a three-dimensional (3D) co-culture artery-on-a-chip to closely simulate the human vascular morphology, both in the healthy and inflammatory disease conditions. The longer-term goal of this project is to develop viable in vitro tools to support high-throughput therapeutic and biopharmaceutical research of various drugs and pharmaceutical formulated compounds.
PROGRESS: To date, we have established two simple needle-based fabrication procedures to achieve controllable arterial architectures on a microchip; (a) an arteriole-like bilayer of human vascular smooth muscle cells (SMC) and endothelial cells (EC), and (b) an artery-like structure composed of multilayers of SMC covered by an inner EC monolayer lining. These proof-of-concept microvascular models have been extensively validated for their robustness and reproducibility, as well as for physical stability and metabolic behaviors to mimic the healthy state of a blood vessel. Meanwhile, experiments are ongoing to incorporate various pathological factors into these artery-like tissues to induce vascular inflammatory disease.
OUTCOME; The results obtained have formed the basis for a manuscript, which is near to submission (by April 2016) as a full length paper to an international tissue engineering journal. It also contributes to a poster presentation at the University of Tokyo Life Science Symposium (第16回東大生命科学シンポジウム) on April 23, 2016.
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