Blood vessel-on-a-chip: publication and interview

Bram van Steen and Lanette Kempers created blood vessels-on-a-chip at the lab of Jaap van Buul at Sanquin Research. Now their research has been published in the Journal of Cell Science. This open source journal placed their beautiful image on the cover and interviewed both young researchers. This is their story:

"The interaction between blood vessels and the immune cells that defend your body against pathogens is currently often studied in animals or with classical cell biology techniques. We would like to study these processes in a model without having to use animals but with all the complexity you can also find in the human body. In this study, we created artificial blood vessels on a chip, using cells derived from humans; we show that our approach is closer to in vivo conditions than other techniques, and we reveal parts of the process that we could not study before using the classical in vitro tools. Using this approach, we reveal different migration modes between different types of white blood cells, both in how they exit the vessel and in the way they migrate into the tissue."

Read the entire interview.