To the barrier!
Israeli scientists, in tandem with American ones, duplicated the patient's blood-brain barrier using organ-on-a-chip technology, creating a chip with stem cells that can be used to develop new personalized methods for studying brain disorders.
To create such a chip, scientists modified blood cells into stem cells (stem cells, in turn, can transform into various types of cells and even into those that make up the blood-brain barrier). The cells were placed on a microfluidic chip the size of a battery, which contains tiny tubules lined with tens of thousands of living cells and tissues. Such a microsystem accurately recreates the processes in which cells are involved, including blocking the flow of certain drugs through the BBB.
It is important to note that when recreating the barrier from the cells of patients with Allan-Herndon-Dudley syndrome, a rare congenital neurological disorder, and patients with Huntington's disease, the barrier functioned the same as in sick patients. This similarity allows you to choose the most effective method of treatment for a particular person, which gives a wide field for activities in the field of precision medicine.
The BBB chip is of particular importance for patients with epilepsy or schizophrenia. For the treatment of these diseases, a small number of FDA-approved drugs are available, which are selected in most cases by trial and error.
The blood-brain barrier blocks the entry of foreign substances into the bloodstream and brain tissue, including drugs, and neurological disorders such as multiple sclerosis, epilepsy, Alzheimer's disease and Huntington's disease affect millions of people around the world and are associated with a defective blood-brain barrier. A more detailed understanding of the functioning of the BBB opens up new opportunities for testing drugs for these and many other incurable diseases, including cancer, because it is the BBB that is the key obstacle to the treatment of brain tumors.
Article by Vatine et al. Human iPSC-Derived Blood-Brain Barrier Chips Enable Disease Modeling and Personalized Medicine Applications is published in the journal Cell Stem Cell.
Elena Panasyuk, portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru / based on Eurekalert First blood-brain barrier chip using stem cells developed by Ben-Gurion University researchers