Skin-on-a-chip model for drug treatment study

• Grant number: 18/11861-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Doctorate
• Start date: November 01, 2018
• End date: October 31, 2019
• Field of knowledge: Engineering - Biomedical Engineering - Bioengineering
• Principal Investigator: Rondinelli Donizetti Herculano
• Grantee: Natan Roberto de Barros
• Supervisor: Alireza Khademhosseini
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Ciências Farmacêuticas (FCFAR). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Araraquara. Araraquara , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), United States
• Associated to the scholarship: 17/02518-8 - Development of polymer blends of latex-alginate and latex-collagen for tissue engineering application, BP.DR

Abstract

Overcoming the challenges that the pharmaceutical industry currently faces, such as ethical and regulatory issues, and the considerable difference between the animal and human organism, requires the development of more sophisticated models of the human body. Organ-on-a-chip technologies has arisen as a new enabling platform for organ modeling and drug screening based on bioinspired microfluidic systems. These devices have the potential to mimic the complex tissue architectures and organ-level interactions that dominate the systemic response to a drug. The present project describes a proposal of design, modeling, fabrication and testing a skin-on-a-chip device to replacing animal tests by assays in a 3D and dynamic system, made up of human cells, efficient to the point of mimicking in a more realistic way the interactions between human skin and agents with cytotoxic potential. The skin-on-a-chip proposed could be capable of accommodating a bioengineered skin equivalent continuously perfused through a microvascular channel, thus providing a solid proof of concept of the feasibility of a skin-modeling device for drug screening.

Scientific publications

(References retrieved automatically from Web of Science and SciELO through information on FAPESP grants and their corresponding numbers as mentioned in the publications by the authors)

BARROS, NATAN R.; KIM, HAN-JUN; GOUIDIE, MARCUS J.; LEE, KANGJU; BANDARU, PRAVEEN; BANTON, ETHAN A.; SARIKHANI, EINOLLAH; SUN, WUJIN; ZHANG, SHIMING; CHO, HYUN-JONG; et al. Biofabrication of endothelial cell, dermal fibroblast, and multilayered keratinocyte layers for skin tissue engineering. BIOFABRICATION, v. 13, n. 3, JUL 2021. (18/11861-0)