AM@UU Seminar: New organ-on-chip approaches for investigating infectious diseases
- Date: 3 April 2025, 15:15–17:00
- Location: Francesco D´Elia, AM4Life, AM@UU
- Type: Seminar
- Lecturer: Samy Gobaa, Biomaterials and Microfluidics core facility, Institut Pasteur, Université Paris Cité, Paris France
- Organiser: Francesco D´Elia, AM4Life, AM@UU
- Contact person: Francesco D´Elia
Controlling the cellular microenvironment including the mechanical landscape, biochemical cues and the cellular composition is critical in order to recapitulate proper tissue organization and function in vitro. Both microfluidics and hydrogel technologies can concur to the production of advanced organs-on-chip devices.
However, these technologies end up producing simple and predefined structures that fall short of recreating the complex organization of living tissues. Controlling tissue architecture is often key to reconstruct biological function in vitro.
For this seminar I will first focus on emulating the vascular function. Here we have developed a comprehensive experimental pipeline that allows for the generation vascular networks with predefined geometries within hydrogel laden microfluidic chips. Practically, we have developed a generic photoablation add-on that can be mounted on regular inverted and automated microscopes. We have demonstrated that this setup is able to carve mm3 networks with a micrometric resolution in various natural and synthetic hydrogels with minimal impact on the viability of the neighboring cells. When endothelialized, the produced vascular trees retain the overall dimensions of the carved network. After connection to a perfusion system, the vascular chips can be further maturated under physiological shear stress.
Today the established pipeline is primarily used for investigating blood vessel infection and other immune cell transmigration assays. Second, I will briefly outline the use of an off the shelf technology (emulate) for the development of custom airway models. Here, we leveraged the multipotent capabilities of human fetal primary cells to produce either airway or alveolar organoids. We then demonstrated efficient production of airway (e.g. ciliated, secretory and basal cells) and alveolar (e.g. pneumocytes type 1 and pneumocytes type 2) cell types. When seeded on-chip, the produced models where used to investigate bacterial and viral infection.