Integrating an Ex Vivo Gut Model into Microfluidic Devices

The gut plays many roles in human health, serving as a critical barrier of to prevent harmful substances from entering the body while also absorbing essential nutrients. Gut barrier dysfunction, termed dysbiosis, can have wide ranging impacts on health from inflammatory bowl disease to depression. Unfortunately, studying the gut barrier is difficult. Traditional in vitro cultures have been developed that use multiple cell types but they rarely are able to replicate the complex physical structure of the gut, most notably crypts and villi, that are essential to gut function. In vivo models keep the biological accuracy but present their own challenges, including inability to directly control the local environment in the gut and use of many animals to account for individual variability. Our lab has recently developed a microfluidic organotypic device that uses an ex vivo tissue slice model mounted in a microfluidic device to provide local control of environment, including oxygen concentrations. While the system uses animal tissue, we are able to significantly reduce animal use because a single animal can be used to generate multiple tissue slices. This talk will focus on our development of this system and use to understand barrier permeability in models of dysbiosis.