Vessels on-a-chip: A self-assembling vascular organoid model

Functional in-vitro organ models can be used for drug development and toxicology assessment, and hold great promise for regenerative and personalised medicine. One current critical limitation is the lack of a perfusable vascular system, which greatly limits their utility, especially for highly perfused organs such as the liver. The Gerhardt lab at the MDC together with colleagues from Charité are developing a self-assembling microvascular system, harnessing the intrinsic morphogenetic capacity of vascular endothelial cells. The developed 3D-cell models contain capillaries, generated by self-organized sprouting and tubulogenesis, from intact connections with organoids of liver tissue. We investigate vessel maturation during vasculogenesis and angiogenesis and describe endothelial heterogeneity in the system over time. The systems also enable the analysis of cell interaction between endothelial cells and several other cell types as well as organ specificity of endothelial cells under the influence of surrounding cells such as hepatocytes. Our goal is to use these approaches to generate functional and mature perfusable capillaries for use in tissue/organ mimics.