Post by Wyss Institute at Harvard University

Inflammatory bowel disease, which comprises the inflammatory conditions Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, affects about 1.6 million Americans, many of whom cannot be effectively treated. This is mostly due to a lack of understanding of what exactly causes the increased inflammation, fibrosis, and compromised intestinal barrier that underlie this disease and its manifold symptoms. A new study, published in Nature Biomedical Engineering and led by Wyss Founding Director Donald Ingber, M.D., Ph.D., developed donor-specific microfluidic Organ Chip models of the colon that replicate major hallmarks of IBD in vitro in an unprecedented way. Their approach pinpointed new drivers of IBD progression and, for the first time, demonstrated a direct impact of pregnancy hormones on IBD severity in female IBD patient chips and recapitulated the enhanced initiation of cancer formation in IBD tissues. First author: Alican Ozkan, Ph.D. https://lnkd.in/eFmVkkQf