Advances of microfluidic intestine-on-a-chip for analyzing anti-inflammation of food

Abstract

Microfluidic intestine-on-a-chip enables novel means of emulating human intestinal pathophysiology in vitro, which can potentially reduce animal testing and substitute simple 2D culture system. Though a great deal of work has been done in the development of microfluidic platforms for intestinal disease modeling and drug screening, potential investigation of the effect of bioactive food compounds on intestinal inflammation remains largely unexplored. In this review, different biomaterials and chip designs have been explored in the fabrication of intestine-on-a-chip. Other key parameters must be carefully controlled and selected, including shear stress, cell type and cell co-culture spatial configuration, etc. Appropriate techniques to quantify the barrier integrity including trans-epithelial electric resistance, specific tight junction markers and permeability measurements should be standardized and compared with in vivo data. Integration of the gut microbiome and the provision of intestinal-specific environment are the key parameters to realize the in vivo intestinal model simulation and accelerate the screening efficiency of bioactive food compounds.

KEYWORDS:

• Microfluidics
• intestinal models
• barrier integrity
• foodborne nanoparticles
• tissue engineering
• anti-inflammation

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars of China (31925031), Liao Ning Revitalization Talents Program (XLYC1902120), Liaoning Province Education Administration (J2020102), the Dalian Science and Technology Star Program (2019RQ067) and National Nature Science Foundation of China (No. 21607151).