The project OSTEONET aims at developing a lab-scale model of human bone tissue, both mimicking the healthy and the osteoporotic bone, which can be used for basic physiology or pathology studies as well as serve as a model for pre-clinical drug-candidate screening. To reach this ambitious goal, expertise is needed in various fields of science and technology, such as biomedical engineering, cellular biology, fluid dynamics and microfluidics, electronics, AI.
Indeed, nowadays there is a lack of lab-scale models of human tissues for all kinds of molecular medicine applications and animals (i.e. in vivo models) or 2D-cultured cells (so-called in vitro) are used instead. Both available in vivo and in vitro models are unsuitable for addressing specific quests: the former implies the usage of animal models, thereby more simple organisms as compared to the human body in addition to the ethical issues, the latter overlooking the complex three-dimensional architecture of human tissues thus, being unable to reliably model certain mechanisms, such as intercellular contacts.
Moreover, human derived samples (e.g. from healthy donors or patients willing to help the research) are not easy to get in general, due to sample isolation, culture and ethics related issues too.
To meet the urge of shifting the models-paradigm in biomedical research, the Consortium is developing an automated 3D-cell culture system, taking advantage of the bioreactor developed by Cellex (namely, BioAxFlow or BAF) that allows for 3D-cell culture upon scaffolds, i.e. mechanical supports similar to bone architecture, tailor-made for resembling either the healthy or the pathological condition (i.e. with different percentages of porosity: more porous scaffolds mimicking osteoarthritis and less porous mimicking the healthy condition). Hand-in-hand with a thorough choice of the most suitable cell line(s) that need to be used, computational modelling is helping by improving the performances of the cell culture process occurring within BAF (e.g. by predicting the fluid-dynamical behaviour of cell culture media) and software development, as well as AI, are being used for augmenting knowledge related to human bone tissue architecture and to transfer it to the scaffolds that are continuously being generated.
