Hidden within our bones, marrow sustains life by producing billions of blood cells daily, from oxygen-carrying red cells to immune-boosting white cells. This vital function is often disrupted in cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy or radiation, which can damage the marrow and lead to dangerously low white cell counts, leaving patients vulnerable to infection.
Now, researchers at Penn’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, Perelman School of Medicine and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia have developed a platform that emulates human marrow’s native environment. This breakthrough addresses a critical need in medical science, as animal studies often fail to fully replicate the complexities of human marrow. Their findings are published in Cell Stem Cell.
The team’s new device is a small plastic chip whose specially designed chambers are filled with human blood stem cells and the surrounding support cells with which they interact in a hydrogel to mimic the intricate process of bone marrow development in the human embryo. This biologically inspired platform makes it possible to build living human marrow tissue that can generate functional human blood cells and release them into culture media flowing in engineered capillary blood vessels.
“We’ve come a long way in terms of our ability to regenerate human tissues in vitro and mimic their complex functions, but I would say this system is probably one of the most sophisticated bioengineered tissue models developed to date,” says Dan Huh, professor in bioengineering and the paper’s senior author.
The bone marrow-on-a-chip allows researchers to simulate and study common side effects of medical treatments, such as radiotherapy and chemotherapy for cancer patients. When connected to another device, it can even model how the bone marrow communicates with other organs, like the lungs, to protect them from infections and other potentially life-threatening conditions.
The bone marrow model and the demonstration of its large-scale production and automation could advance fields as diverse as drug development by enabling automated, high-throughput preclinical screening of marrow toxicity of anticancer drugs and space travel (by allowing researchers to study the effects of prolonged radiation exposure and microgravity on the immune system of astronauts).
Read more at Penn Engineering Today.
