Our ultimate goal is the connected model of gut-brain and microbiome, however, individual modules are interesting as test models for a variety of laboratories worldwide. Many groups are keen to test bacterial products or mimic diseases such as Crohn’s disease to determine how they might use microbes or their derivatives to protect against or even reverse deleterious effects on the gut (and brain). In the short term, this project has the potential to dramatically change how such things are studied in vitro. In the long term, our work will contribute towards the understanding of diseases related to microbial imbalances in the human body.
What exactly did we achieve?
We developed conducting polymer devices that are made of honeycomb like scaffolds. These scaffolds provide a template for cells to grow and they measure the cells as the grow and mature into tissue.
We developed protocols to grow multiple types of cells together in our devices, optimising conditions and tuning the scaffolds to be as like native tissue as possible, resulting in tissue structure that resembles the gastrointestinal (GI) tract outermost layer - the mucosa, and the neurovascular unit.
We succeeded in developing a platform that allowed us to grow live microbes on our devices, mimicking the way that the microbiome resides in the GI tract. We showed that we can screen individual bacterial components or mixtures of microbes as well as their products, assessing how they affect gut and brain health
We have begun working with clinicians to integrate cells from patient biopsies, thus developing personalised models. Biopsies from patients with diseases such as inflammatory bowel disease will allow us to test potential therapeutics in the future.
An ERC proof of concept project is currently underway on integration of our devices into commercially available microfluidic platforms for Organ on Chip. In addition, our devices are being expanded beyond gut and brain, to being used for lung models, liver models and more. The continuous monitoring afforded is extremely useful as a live monitor of tissue health.
A patent was filed on the conducting polymer scaffold device. We anticipate starting a company shortly.
We have published many papers during the grant, and presented the work at a large number of conferences internationally.
A full list of our manuscripts is available here
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=kCDJLFYAAAAJ&hl=en(odnośnik otworzy się w nowym oknie)
