The success of an organ transplant critically depends on the development and connection of new blood vessels to the implant. Before such a functional blood network is established, the supply of oxygen and nutrients to the implant are sparse. This environment can result in severe damage to the pre-mature blood vessel connections, causing detrimental effects to the implant viability. An emerging treatment is based on cell therapy, where engineered blood vessel cells with an enhanced fitness are injected into the patient, to replace the defective networks. However, due to the limitation in testing techniques, the functionality of these therapeutic cells are not well understood. This project aims to develop a user-friendly experimental tool to better characterise the engineered blood vessel cells. It is based on a microfluidic chip combined with extracellar matrices, which can simulate the evolving physiological environments, post-transplantation. The ultimate goal is to provide the clinicians with a simple testing platform, which will deliver important information in regards to the cell therapy dosage and efficacy, thus improving treatment outcome and patient safety.
| Dr. Yan Yan Shery Huang |
Department of Engineering |
| Prof. Andrew Lever |
Department of Medicine |
