Human Retinal Microvasculature-on-a-Chip for Drug Discovery.

Retinal cells within neurovascular units generate the blood-retinal barrier (BRB) to regulate the local retinal microenvironment and to limit access to inflammatory cells. Breakdown of the endothelial junctional complexes in the BRB negatively affects neuronal signaling and ultimately causes vision loss. As new therapeutics are being developed either to prevent barrier disruption or to restore barrier function, access to physiologically relevant human in vitro tissue models that recapitulate important features of barrier biology is essential for disease modeling, target validation, and toxicity assessment.

Concise review: growing hearts in the right place: on the design of biomimetic materials for cardiac stem cell differentiation.

Tissue engineering aims at recapitulating permissive conditions that enable cells to collaborate and form functional tissues. Applications range from human tissue modeling for diagnostic purposes to therapeutic solutions in regenerative medicine and surgery. Across this spectrum, human stem cells are the active ingredient, expandable virtually indefinitely and with the propensity to generate new tissue.

Long-term functional benefits of human embryonic stem cell-derived cardiac progenitors embedded into a fibrin scaffold.

Background: Cardiac-committed cells and biomimetic scaffolds independently improve the therapeutic efficacy of stem cells. In this study we tested the long-term effects of their combination.

Methods: Eighty immune-deficient rats underwent permanent coronary artery ligation.

Towards a clinical use of human embryonic stem cell-derived cardiac progenitors: a translational experience.

Aim: There is now compelling evidence that cells committed to a cardiac lineage are most effective for improving the function of infarcted hearts. This has been confirmed by our pre-clinical studies entailing transplantation of human embryonic stem cell (hESC)-derived cardiac progenitors in rat and non-human primate models of myocardial infarction. These data have paved the way for a translational programme aimed at a phase I clinical trial.

Micropatterning Alginate Substrates for Cardiovascular Muscle on a Chip.

Soft hydrogels such as alginate are ideal substrates for building muscle because they have structural and mechanical properties close to the extracellular matrix (ECM) network. However, hydrogels are generally not amenable to protein adhesion and patterning. Moreover, muscle structures and their underlying ECM are highly anisotropic, and it is imperative that models recapitulate the structural anisotropy in reconstructed tissues for relevance due to the tight coupling between sturcture and function in these systems.