Host: The Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers
Name : [in Japanese]
Date : March 10, 2021 - March 11, 2021
The global prevalence of diabetes is a growing issue worldwide. Type II diabetes is the most common form of diabetes. Insulin resistance is a characteristic feature of type II diabetes and plays an important role in the progression of type II diabetes. Several therapeutic agents have been developed for insulin resistance, however, there is still a need for novel therapeutic strategies and agents. The efficacy and toxicity of drugs are evaluated using laboratory animals and cultured cells in non- clinical studies. However, these models fail to predict the efficacy and toxicity of tested drugs in the human body because they do not fully recapitulate complex physiological systems such as interactions between organs. Therefore, a novel system for better prediction of clinical outcomes is required. To achieve this goal, microfluidics-based in vitro culture models such as Microphysiological system (MPS) has been developed in the research fields of μTAS. The purpose of this study is to establish an in vitro screening model for antidiabetic drugs using multi-organ MPS. Here, we constructed a fat-skeletal muscle co-culture model as a preliminary step. As a functional evaluation of multi-organ MPS, we performed coculture of fat and skeletal muscle cells. As a result, the differentiation markers of fat and skeletal muscle cells were maintained during the co-culture, indicating that co-culture of fat-skeletal muscle is possible by using our multi-organ MPS.
