For more than 25 years, lab-on-a-chip technology has allowed researchers to model human organs and blood vessels by using real human cells in artificial microscopic environments. These micro-physiological systems (MPS) may replicate human cells and mimic organs or even full organ systems under numerous conditions. They have become key to studying everything from heart disease to the effectiveness of new drugs.
However, they have been held back by one major limitation: an inability to accurately re-create the blood flow waveforms arising from the human heart.
"We have been struggling over decades to actually find a stable perfusion system," said Dr. Abhishek Jain , associate professor of biomedical engineering and Barbara and Ralph Cox '53 Faculty Fellow at Texas A&M University. "The human blood flow arising from the heartbeat is made of multiple pulses, multiple wavelengths, and it happens over a very short period of time: you need a change in flow within 50 milliseconds. That cannot be delivered by the pump equipment currently available."
The waveform of blood flow — and cells' reaction to it — is at the heart of numerous health problems. When the wave pattern of blood flow changes due to disease, age, or even zero gravity, the endothelial cells which line every blood vessel in the body begin to exhibit pathological cell behaviors, eventually leading to life-threatening diseases.
