Mut Stephen Ryan, Mishra Shawn, Vazquez Maribel
Department of Biomedical Engineering, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, 599 Taylor Rd, Piscataway, NJ 08854, USA.
Regeneron, 777 Old Saw Mill River Rd, Tarrytown, NY 10591, USA.
Micromachines (Basel). 2022 Mar 2;13(3):406. doi: 10.3390/mi13030406.
Millions of adults are affected by progressive vision loss worldwide. The rising incidence of retinal diseases can be attributed to damage or degeneration of neurons that convert light into electrical signals for vision. Contemporary cell replacement therapies have transplanted stem and progenitor-like cells (SCs) into adult retinal tissue to replace damaged neurons and restore the visual neural network. However, the inability of SCs to migrate to targeted areas remains a fundamental challenge. Current bioengineering projects aim to integrate microfluidic technologies with organotypic cultures to examine SC behaviors within biomimetic environments. The application of neural phantoms, or eye facsimiles, in such systems will greatly aid the study of SC migratory behaviors in 3D. This project developed a bioengineering system, called the μ-Eye, to stimulate and examine the migration of retinal SCs within eye facsimiles using external chemical and electrical stimuli. Results illustrate that the imposed fields stimulated large, directional SC migration into eye facsimiles, and that electro-chemotactic stimuli produced significantly larger increases in cell migration than the individual stimuli combined. These findings highlight the significance of microfluidic systems in the development of approaches that apply external fields for neural repair and promote migration-targeted strategies for retinal cell replacement therapy.
全球数以百万计的成年人受到渐进性视力丧失的影响。视网膜疾病发病率的上升可归因于将光转化为视觉电信号的神经元的损伤或退化。当代细胞替代疗法已将干细胞和祖细胞样细胞（SCs）移植到成人视网膜组织中，以替代受损神经元并恢复视觉神经网络。然而，SCs无法迁移到目标区域仍然是一个根本性挑战。当前的生物工程项目旨在将微流控技术与器官型培养相结合，以研究仿生环境中的SCs行为。在这种系统中应用神经模型或眼睛模型将极大地有助于研究SCs在三维空间中的迁移行为。该项目开发了一种名为μ-Eye的生物工程系统，以使用外部化学和电刺激来刺激和检测视网膜SCs在眼睛模型中的迁移。结果表明，施加的场刺激SCs向眼睛模型进行大量定向迁移，并且电化学趋化刺激比单独的刺激组合产生的细胞迁移增加显著更大。这些发现突出了微流控系统在开发应用外部场进行神经修复以及促进针对视网膜细胞替代疗法的迁移靶向策略方面的重要性。
