Over the last decades, the gut intestinal microflora and other microbial communities present in our body raised a strong interest in the health research domain as it was discovered their possible relation to the pathophysiology of major organs and systems. Gut epithelial cells, together with our resident microbiota, are involved in the modulation of the host immune system and represent the first line of adsorption of drugs and nutraceuticals. In parallel to microbiota studies, a great effort has been devoted to assess the role of the “probiotics”, live microorganisms that, administered in adequate amounts, are able to confer a benefit to the host health.
Probiotics are currently widely used in the prevention/treatment of many diseases. One critical point that is still an issue in the characterisation of new potential probiotics is the difficulty in mimicking with high reliability the gut microenvironment condition using animal models or the current in vitro tools, poorly representative of the real in vivo situation.
This gap motivates the need for the development of alternative research tools, such as the fluidic devices, to study the mechanisms at play in human gut microenvironment and contribute to the success rate of expensive, risky and time-consuming pre-clinical and clinical trials.
In this frame, our PROMETEO project aims to perform the technical and commercial feasibility of an integrated probiotic/gut epithelium/immune system millifluidic platform, based on a patented organ-on-a-chip technological device, providing the basis for a new generation of innovative solutions for probiotics/drug development.
PROMETEO has been run by a consortium between Politecnico di Milano and AAT-Advanced Analytical Technologies, an innovative SME specialized in promoting innovation in the probiotic sector, thus combining a solid technological expertise and an in-depth knowledge of the market.
