Amyloid beta transport through an in vitro blood-brain barrier
October 2017
University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
Amyloid-beta accumulation in the brain is one of the hallmarks of Alzheimer's disease. Defective clearance of amyloid-beta through the blood-brain barrier causes cerebral amyloid angiopathy and is present in most Alzheimer's disease patients. Here, a 3D bioengineered human vessels model is used to study amyloid-beta clearance through cerebrovascular microvessels. This model consists of a scaffold seeded with human endothelial cells and human smooth muscle cells in the presence or not of human astrocytes and is located in a chamber connected to a microfluidic system. In this setup, the researchers show that brain and circulating lipoproteins synergise to clear amyloid-beta across the modelled human vessels. However, these mechanisms show differences depending on the amyloid-beta peptide and the brain lipoprotein isoforms, corresponding to what is observed in human patients. The results show that this newly developed model can reflect the complexity of the cerebrovascular environment and give new insights into the pathological processes that occur during neurodegenerative diseases involving the vascular system in a human context.
Clearance of beta-amyloid is facilitated by apolipoprotein E and circulating high-density lipoproteins in bioengineered human vessels
Jerome Robert, Cheryl L Wellington
Added on: 08-18-2021
[1] https://elifesciences.org/articles/29595[2] https://data.jrc.ec.europa.eu/dataset/a8fd26ef-b113-47ab-92ba-fd2be449c7eb
