Publications

Functional precision medicine (FPM) has emerged as a new approach to improve cancer treatment. Despite its potential, FPM assays present important limitations such as the number of cells and trained personnel required. To overcome these impediments, here we describe a novel microfluidic platform that can be used to perform FPM assays, optimizing the use of primary cancer cells and simplifying the process by using microfluidics to automatize the process.© 2024. The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.

JTD Keywords: Bioassay, Biological assay, Cancer treatment, Functional assays, Lab-on-a-chip devices, Microfluidics, Personalized medicine, Precision medicine

Muscular dystrophies are a heterogeneous group of highly debilitating diseases that result in muscle atrophy and weakness. The lack of suitable cellular and animal models that reproduce specific aspects of their pathophysiology is one of the reasons why there are no curative treatments for these disorders. This highlights a considerable gap between current laboratory models and clinical practice. We strongly believe that organs-on-chip could help to fill this gap. Organs-on-chip, and in particular muscles-on-chip, are microfluidic devices that integrate functional skeletal muscle tissues. Biosensors in these systems allow monitoring of muscle homeostasis or drug responses in situ. This Perspective outlines the potential of organs-on-chip as advanced models for muscular dystrophies, as well as the current challenges and future opportunities for this technology.© 2023. Published by The Company of Biologists Ltd.

JTD Keywords: cell, tissue, Animals, Lab-on-a-chip devices, Muscle, skeletal, Muscular dystrophies, Skeletal-muscle

Organ-on-a-chip (OOC) devices offer new approaches for metabolic disease modeling and drug discovery by providing biologically relevant models of tissues and organs in vitro with a high degree of control over experimental variables for high-content screening applications. Yet, to fully exploit the potential of these platforms, there is a need to interface them with integrated non-labeled sensing modules, capable of monitoring, in situ, their biochemical response to external stimuli, such as stress or drugs. In order to meet this need, we aim here to develop an integrated technology based on coupling a localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) sensing module to an OOC device to monitor the insulin in situ secretion in pancreatic islets, a key physiological event that is usually perturbed in metabolic diseases such as type 2 diabetes (T2D). As a proof of concept, we developed a biomimetic islet-on-a-chip (IOC) device composed of mouse pancreatic islets hosted in a cellulose-based scaffold as a novel approach. The IOC was interfaced with a state-of-the-art on-chip LSPR sensing platform to monitor the in situ insulin secretion. The developed platform offers a powerful tool to enable the in situ response study of microtissues to external stimuli for applications such as a drug-screening platform for human models, bypassing animal testing.

JTD Keywords: biosensor, cytoarchitecture, dna hybridization, gelatin, in situ insulin monitoring, langerhans, lspr sensors, microfluidic device, organ-on-a-chip, parallel, platform, scaffold, Animals, Biosensing techniques, Diabetes mellitus, type 2, Drug discovery, Drug evaluation, preclinical, Human pancreatic-islets, Humans, In situ insulin monitoring, Insulin secretion, Insulins, Lab-on-a-chip devices, Lspr sensors, Oligonucleotide array sequence analysis, Organ-on-a-chip, Surface plasmon resonance