Vivian Nguyen
PhD student
Project description:
Diabetic nephropathy is the leading cause for end-stage renal disease, making it the most common cause of severe long-term pain and physical disability, resulting in reduced quality of life. Unfortunately, the only effective therapy available for kidney patients is transplantation. Hence, there is an urgent need for novel, regenerative therapeutics for kidney diseases. However, experiments in animals is expensive, time-consuming, and associated with ethical concerns. Recent preclinical work has demonstrated that the kidney can be protected against, and recover from acute and chronic kidney injury by MSC-derived EVs1;2 . Microfluidics systems and 2D- and 3D-human organoid biology now provide the opportunity to develop in vitro chip-based models to study the (patho-)physiology of human organs3. We hypothesize that mimicking diabetic nephropathy in a multi-organ-on-a-chip model allows for medium-high throughput screening of candidate therapies for kidney regeneration, thereby reducing the amount, costs and burden of animal experiments.