Organoids for neurodegenerative diseases: Orgtherapy
No satisfying treatments are currently available for neurodegenerative diseases.
Orgtherapy aims to tackle this problem by developing a relevant spinal cord model based on organoid technology to create more performant therapeutics.
This project is completed now. If interested, feel free to contact us.
Organoids to study neurodegenerative diseases: introduction
The delivery of therapeutic agents to the central nervous system remains a significant challenge, especially in the case of neurodegenerative diseases like amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and frontotemporal dementia.
No satisfying treatment is available for these diseases, first because of the poor understanding of disease mechanisms and the lack of relevant organoid models to study them but also because of the inefficient and non-selective delivery of the current therapeutics.
Organoids to study neurodegenerative diseases: project description
The Orgtherapy project aims to use organ-on-a-chip technology as a basis to develop multicellular organoid models from iPSCs, mimicking spinal cord function.
These spinal cord organoids will then be integrated into a microfluidic device to explore the mechanistic pathways occurring in neurodegenerative diseases and to screen new potential therapeutics.
We will bring our expertise in flow control and microfluidic instrumentation to precisely control and tune the organoid models’ microenvironment.
Microfluidic flow controllers will enable precise flow of fluids through the device containing the spinal cord organoids, including recovery of flow-through.
A system of flow switch matrices will allow for culture perfusion and drug delivery into the microfluidic device, as well as the collection of conditioned media for further analysis.
The ESI software (Elveflow) will be adapted for this specific organoid application to provide a user-friendly computer interface to program the injection steps easily.
Results from this project
In the light of the Orgtherapy project, we developed the blood-brain barrier-on-a-chip, and the spheroid cell culture packs.
Funding
This project has received funding from the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR) in the frame of ERA-NET JPco-fuND 2019 (Orgtherapy).
