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,

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.

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

Drs. Polacheck and Cao discuss the opportunities and challenges associated with new approach methodologies (NAMs) in preclinical drug development. This perspective piece comes after nearly a year of discussion, planning, and collaboration between the Polacheck and Cao labs to develop organ-on-chip platforms that can replace or augment animal models in pre-clinical drug development. The perspective can be found here .

Mitesh's work investigating the effects of blood pressure and flow on immune cell adhesion and migration across the endothelial wall in the context of chronic kidney disease was just published. The paper is entitled, "Microphysiological uremia model reveals biophysical potentiators of vascular dysfunction," and can be viewed via open access here . This work was gratiously supported by the UNC Institute for Convergent Science and continues a long-standing collaboration between

A recently accepted comprehensive review of lymphatic-on-chip models highlights advances and challenges in humanized models of the lymphatic system. An advanced copy of the article to be published in Annual Review of Biomedical Engineering was recently posted on the journal's website: https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-bioeng-110222-100246