Pandian Navaneeth K R, Mannino Robert G, Lam Wilbur A, Jain Abhishek
Department of Biomedical Engineering, College of Engineering, Texas A&M University, USA.
The Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA.
Curr Opin Biomed Eng. 2018 Mar;5:29-34. doi: 10.1016/j.cobme.2017.12.001. Epub 2017 Dec 18.
The most common pathology of the blood-vessel organ system is thrombosis or undesirable clotting of the blood. Thrombosis is life threatening as more than 25% of such cases lead to sudden death from stroke and myocardial infarction. Even though the process of thrombosis has been extensively investigated with animal models, its exact pathobiology in different blood vessels is not yet fully understood and drug assessment remains unpredictable. This is primarily because the cause for thrombus formation is multifactorial and depends on the interplay of flow patterns within the blood vessel, the vessel wall or endothelium, extracellular matrix, parenchymal tissue, and the cellular and plasma components of the blood. Current and animal models do not mimic or dissect this organ-level complexity faithfully. However, microfluidic technology has recently been deployed to effectively recapitulate blood-endothelial-epithelial interactions in the onset of thrombosis in blood vessels. This technology is promising because it permits inclusion of primary human cells and blood obtained from patients, which is currently lacking in other models of thrombosis. In this review, we summarize the current state-of-the-art and practices in microfluidics and expected improvements in this field that will impact basic understanding of thrombosis, drug discovery and personalized medicine.
血管器官系统最常见的病理学表现是血栓形成，即血液出现异常凝结。血栓形成会危及生命，因为超过25%的此类病例会导致因中风和心肌梗死而猝死。尽管已经利用动物模型对血栓形成过程进行了广泛研究，但其在不同血管中的确切病理生物学仍未被完全理解，药物评估也仍然不可预测。这主要是因为血栓形成的原因是多因素的，取决于血管内的血流模式、血管壁或内皮、细胞外基质、实质组织以及血液的细胞和血浆成分之间的相互作用。目前的动物模型并不能如实地模拟或剖析这种器官水平的复杂性。然而，微流控技术最近已被用于有效地再现血管血栓形成过程中血液 - 内皮 - 上皮的相互作用。这项技术很有前景，因为它允许纳入原代人类细胞和从患者身上获取的血液，而这是目前其他血栓形成模型所缺乏的。在这篇综述中，我们总结了微流控技术的当前技术水平和实践，以及该领域预期的改进，这些改进将影响对血栓形成的基本理解、药物发现和个性化医疗。
