Engineering news
These leading causes of death worldwide are often caused by atherosclerosis – the constriction of blood vessels due to a build-up of fat on artery walls.
Biomedical engineers in created a new device that can be used to model atherosclerosis. In a paper, published this week in APL Bioengineering, they illustrate how the device can be used to model how the cells lining arteries respond as fatty ‘plaques’ build up.
Previous ‘organ on a chip’ devices have focussed on the biological aspects of atherosclerosis, without taking into account the geometry of blood vessels.
“Atherosclerosis is a very important and complex disease,” said Han Wei Hou, a biomedical engineer at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. “It involves not just the biological aspect of endothelial dysfunction, but also the biomechanics of blood flow.”
The new device seeks to address that problem, and fits on a single square-inch chip. It consists of two stacked chambers, separated by a thin and flexible polymer membrane. The bottom chamber contains air, while the top contains a fluid with similar mechanical properties to blood.
By pumping air into the bottom chamber, the researchers were able to stretch the membrane to simulate the narrowing of a blood vessel and study how it affected the growth of endothelial cells.
Their findings were consistent with the widely accepted picture of the disease, in which decreased blood flow causes inflammation, and the accumulation of immune cells called monocytes that create plaques.
“The new model can more accurately simulate atherosclerosis because the researcher can precisely tune constriction by controlling air pressure,” said Hou, adding that it could potentially help develop new treatment and diagnostic techniques.
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