Abstract
An in vitro blood–brain barrier (BBB) model must be highly reproducible and imitate as much as possible the properties of the in vivo environment, from both the functional and anatomical point of view. In our latest work, a BBB prototype was implemented through the use of human primary brain cells and then integrated in a microfluidic platform (Lauranzano et al., Adv Biosyst 3:e1800335, 2019). Here we describe, step by step, the setting of a customized bio-mimetic platform, which uses human brain endothelial cells and primary astrocytic cells to allow the study of the complex interactions between the immune system and the brain in healthy and neuroinflammatory conditions. The model can be exploited to investigate the neuroimmune communication at the blood–brain interface and to examine the transmigration of patient-derived lymphocytes in order to envisage cutting-edge strategies to restore barrier integrity and block the immune cell influx into the CNS.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Humanitas Neuro Center neurosurgeons for providing brain tissues and Pardi’s Lab (San Raffaele Hospital) for the NVU microfluidic integration. This work was supported by the Ministero della Salute (Grant No. GR-2018-12367117 and GR-2019-12370776) to E.L and by Fondazione Italiana Sclerosi Multipla (grant FISM 2019/R-Single/032) to M.M. Illustrations were created with BioRender (©BioRender: biorender.com).
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Lauranzano, E., Rasile, M., Matteoli, M. (2022). Integrating Primary Astrocytes in a Microfluidic Model of the Blood–Brain Barrier. In: Stone, N. (eds) The Blood-Brain Barrier. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 2492. Humana, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-2289-6_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-2289-6_12
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