Multicellular microfluidic model of the blood-brain barrier
2018
University of Leeds, Leeds, United Kingdom
The blood-brain barrier is essential for the homeostasis of the central nervous system. Disruption of the blood-brain barrier is observed in many neurodegenerative diseases. Therefore, is utterly important to develop human models that allow studying the mechanisms of the different cell types involved in the functioning of the blood-brain barrier. Here a microfluidic co-culture system is presented that contains human primary endothelial cells, pericytes and astrocytes in separated chambers to study the optimal conditions of the culture of each cell type and the paracrine interactions between them. Furthermore, the researchers are able to explore the effects of an amyloid-beta peptide in this setup, showing that it can be used to investigate mechanisms and therapies of neurodegenerative diseases. The results show that this newly developed model can be a powerful tool to study in vitro the individual cellular components of the human blood-brain barrier and the effects of disease-associated metabolites in them.
A novel dynamic multicellular co-culture system for studying individual blood-brain barrier cell types in brain diseases and cytotoxicity testing
Sikha Saha
Added on: 08-19-2021
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-26480-8[2] https://data.jrc.ec.europa.eu/dataset/a8fd26ef-b113-47ab-92ba-fd2be449c7eb
