stephane avril

MecOnChip

Recent vascular engineering efforts have focused on two distinct directions: either tissue engineered vessels for implantation as grafts or engineered vascular mimics (vessels-on-a-chip) that serve as platforms for understanding vascular development and disease or for testing the effects of drugs and/or endovascular devices. Our proposal falls in the second category. The state of the art is typically the production of a system that mimics the physiological setting to the extent possible by targeting relevant dimensions, incorporating the pertinent cell types, and attempting to reproduce physiological conditions. Our aim is to go at least one step further and to design and develop a vessel-on-a-chip platform that allows control of the cellular response by modulating the local mechanical environment. Our research hypothesis is that the cross-talk between cells and their biophysical microenvironment regulates the phenotypic endpoint of each single cell.