Translational Microfluidics Laboratory

The Polacheck Lab and Carter Cao's lab at the Eshleman School of Pharmacy were awarded a gran through the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) through the Computational ADME-Tox and Physiology Analysis for Safer Therapeutics (CATALYST) program. The grant will fund the Polacheck Lab to develop high-throughput, patient-specific, immune-competent organ-on-chip models that will inform the development of more accurate pharmokinetic models and toxicity predictions,

Bill traveled to Baltimore to present recent work by Dr. Doherty and Ryan on the development of tissue-engineered approaches for modeling vascular Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. The invited talk at the American Society for Matrix Biology was in a special session focused on arteriopathies and was supported by the Marfan Foundation.

Welcome to Dr. Kristin Kim from Dr. Chris Lemmon's lab at VCU! We are very excited to have Kristin join to take on efforts involving scale-up and reproducibility for fabricating organs-on-chip. Dr. Kim's deep knowledge in mechanotransduction and cell-matrix adhesion signaling will be critical for developing preclinical microphysiological tools during her time as a postdoc in the Polacheck Lab.

Bill presented recent work by Dr. Aw and Chloe on fluid mechanotransduction by the vascular endothelium to the NSF Center for Engineering Mechanobiology, headquartered at the University of Pennsylvania. It was good to see old friends and collaborators and to have a chance to discuss how mechanotransduction goes awry in vascular malformations.

Dr. Danica Dy, who recently defended her PhD in Dr. Rob Wirka's lab, published in Frontiers in Cardiovascular Medicine on the funcitonal role of TWIST1 in arterial smooth muscle. TWIST1 has been identified as a causal gene that increases risk for several vascular diseases, yet the molecular mechanisms remain unclear. Dr. Rathod from the Polacheck Lab helped to develop functional assays for smooth muscle cell migration that helped elucidate how TWIST1 modulates cellular phenot

Aanya and colleagues report on new technology to measure vasoconstriction and vasodilation of arterial tissue. The platforms, based on previous work by UNC/NCSU BME colleague Dr. Wes Legant, consist of microfabricated cantilevers with known mechanical properties that can be used to quantitatively determine force generation by vascular smooth muscle cells. Aanya and colleagues in the Polacheck Lab had to develop an entirely new manufacturing protocol to tune the system appropr