Blood vessels on a chip: EMBL video shows how a Barcelona team builds perfused tissues
Kristina Haase's group at EMBL Barcelona grows tiny perfusable blood vessels on chips – for models of the heart, placenta or tumours. A new EMBL video presents the work.
Photo: Enric / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped and resized)
Video: YouTube · European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) · youtube.com
Many diseases are linked to problems in the smallest blood vessels. The research group of Kristina Haase at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Barcelona therefore builds three-dimensional, perfusable tissue models in the lab. A video published by EMBL on 22 October presents the group. Microvessels are "our earliest functional organs", and their dysfunction is linked to numerous diseases, the group writes on its research page.
To do this, the researchers let human cells self-assemble into vessels inside microfluidic chips and combine them with tissue-specific cells. This yields vascular models of the placenta, heart, lung and breast. There are also cardiac models derived from induced pluripotent stem cells, as well as vascularised tumour spheroids and patient-derived organoids. The team is also developing chips with controlled flow.
The team sees applications in disease research, drug testing and regenerative medicine; in the long term, the platforms are meant to be used in preclinical research. In 2022, Haase received an ERC Starting Grant of 1.5 million euros over five years for a heart model with beating muscle tissue and functional blood vessels.