okay this is gonna sound absolutely
insane so I'm just gonna come right out
and say it
scientists at Lawrence Livermore are
modeling organs like live human organs
on chips we're working on the brain the
heart all the blood vessels that send blood all over your body which is called
your vasculature and a recent development in this work is the
successful modeling of one of the most mysterious and difficult to understand
parts of your brain the blood-brain barrier
so the blood-brain barrier specifically is that that barrier function between
the brain space and the blood so yes this would be the blood-brain barrier
itself yep the endothelium okay okay hold up
here's where we're at the blood-brain barrier
or the BBB if we're being
efficient is this thin sheet of tissue
that separates your blood vessels from
your brain tissue the cells that make up
a large part of the BBB are called
endothelial cells and they are joined together by something called tight
junctions which make it really hard for
stuff to get through the BBB these
endothelial cells form a super tight mono layer or a single layer of cells
between your brain and the rest of your
body and really the rest of the world
the BBB essentially acts as a filter protecting your brain from things that
shouldn't get in but at the same time letting in things that your brain does
need like oxygen and nutrients so your BBB itself has to be pretty smart and
this is what neuroscientists call highly
selective which means it's picky about
what it lets through and what it doesn't and this is really important because
because we want to be able to understand
how things make it across the barrier so
for example in the case of cancer
metastasis there are certain cancers
that really like to go to the the brain
space one of those for example is breast
cancer it's going to migrate up into the brain space and what's weird is that
this monolayer is supposed to protect your brain but for some reason it allows
things to cross over it then makes it harder because once that cancer is
growing on the other side if you want to administer drug treatments it's really
hard because again this barrier is going to prevent certain things from going
across in cases especially with things like you know treatment of certain type
of mood disorders or something where you to treat the brain space you want to be
able to make sure that things cross from the defense side of things you know
there are certain things that cross the blood-brain barrier that you don't want
them to and so how can you go back and sort of rescue back the function of what
has crossed over so understanding more about the BBB and how it works is truly
essential to lots of facets of science that involve the brain but it's a tricky
thing to study because it's hard to see in any great detail with the brain
imaging tools we have at our disposal and it's very difficult to tell what's
going on at the cellular level in a BBB in a human body
so what do we do the answer is invent a whole new technology that may change the
way we study the brain so traditionally you have cells on a plate and by putting
these cells into this 3d environment
and underflow
we're changing how those cells react and
how they behave cells are sensitive to
the environment that they're in and
changes to mechanical stress or
surrounding cell types will change how
they how they behave to each other and
and how they communicate so that little plastic square obviously doesn't look
anything like a human but it's a it's a it's a way of being able to test the
drugs on something that isn't human but also isn't an animal we already know
that animal research isn't a great predictor of human health so this is
really a way to sort of bridge that gap because how can you get close to humans
without actually trying it on humans first and do sort of all of the
exploratory stuff before you do it on human patients
so this tiny seemingly simple device takes us from cells in a 2d environment
where they're not necessarily behaving anywhere close to how they would in a 3d
environment like in your body and brings us into a 3d space where we can see how
these cells would behave in more true-to-life environments how they react
when we make liquid flow past them just like we would see in your actual blood
brain barrier but cells are a tricky business because you know they're alive
like you can't just plop them down and leave them alone I mean it's a
bioengineering problem right and those two disciplines on their own are very
hard so biology is incredibly hard keeping things alive it's like having a
pet right like these are devices that we make and then we have to continue to
take care of them in our case our devices the minimum that we would run a
device would be a week but we've run them up to four weeks of culture so
that's four weeks of us having to feed something and take care of and make sure
that it's okay and so that's the biology part of it and then engineering comes
with all its challenges right like how do you build a system in a way that's
repeatable and gives you what you want but then we have the third challenge
which is bringing those things together so how do we know that a device like
this is anywhere close to modeling something like how the BBB really is how
do we know that it works well we can see it that monolayer that form looks
something like this so this is the endothelial cells and they've been
stained for what is called acting and that's what's visible in green and then
the nuclei which is kind of the brain of a brain of a cell is in blue so wherever
there's a blue dot there's a single cell and then the green is the body of the
cell and so you can see that it kind of spreads across where the cells are kind
of connected to one another I'm sorry I just have to take a minute to point out
here that what we're looking at our actual cells cultured inside this novel
device and they formed these tight junctions that define the blood-brain
barrier and can see it all like this is not a
simulation or a rendering these are the real cells what I just think it's so
crazy that science lets us do that but it's not all about the pretty pictures
because Monica and her team do have to work really hard to coach these cells
into behaving in this specific way like to get them to hold hands super tightly
like they do in your actual be baby they need to be crowded into a small
space in a certain way and fed certain signals that tell them to glue together
like this and here's where it gets even more amazing
the BBB is not the only human system that Livermore scientists are modeling
on a chip there are also modeling systems like the central nervous system
or your CNS which is the rest of your brain under spinal cord so if you put
these two systems together the CNS and the BBB we could have a highly detailed
and accurate model of the way your brain cells behave and with the BBB which is a
huge deal because lots of people leave that out of brain models because well
it's hard and eventually we could have a whole model of a human body on a chip in
3d with live human cells I mean yes that's the goal to be able to piece all
these organs together and be able to understand okay here's a drug that I've
given you that treats your liver is it gonna have any side effects to other
parts of your organs because this is really kind of looking at one piece of
it you know how things cross the blood-brain barrier but those drugs are
obviously going to have other effects because they're systemically delivered
just gonna go to one space to go to other spaces so the end goal for all of
these devices is to integrate them to create sort of a human model what really
resonates with me is the impact that these devices can have and then as a bio
engineer I really like playing in that space as hard as it is I really kind of
enjoy that challenge because it's a really unique challenge when you're
trying to make both pieces work so for me that's the part that makes me
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