Nom i cognoms / Name and surname
Irene Marco-Rius
Afiliació / Affiliation
Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC)
Programa de finançament europeu en que s’enmarca aquest projecte? / European funding programme in which this project is being carried out?
EU support (FP7, H2020, etc.) other than MSCA
Títol del projecte / Project title
BLOC: Benchtop NMR for lab-on a-chip
Número del projecte / Project number
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under No. 863037.
Breu explicació del projecte / Brief explanation of your project
BLOC project is developing a benchtop NMR spectrometer based on magnetic resonance spectroscopy and imaging using dynamic nuclear polarisation (DNP-MR). The integration of this technology with tissue engineering systems will be applied to monitor disease and evaluate responses to different stimulus. As a proof-of-concept, researchers will fabricate a biomimetic model composed of liver spheroids and pancreatic islets and develop the necessary DNP-MR hardware and software to study metabolic diseases.
The benchtop device will accommodate microfluidic platforms containing 3D in vitro models and enable the study of their cellular metabolism in real-time, in situ and non-destructively by hyperpolarization-enhanced MRS. This technology will be applied to monitor disease and evaluate responses of bioengineered tissues to different stimuli.
The technology derived from this project will have a direct impact in the society and the public opinion since it will allow a significant reduction on the use of animals for experimentation purposes, minimizing ethical issues related with this topic. Moreover, the use of human engineered tissues will bring pre-clinical experiments more accurate and efficient, facilitating the extrapolation of results to humans.
The idea is to create a standardized and small device which can be easily installed in any laboratory. Besides being used in the biomedical field, the equipment developed in this project will be an easy-to-use and low-cost system with potential applications in other areas, as environmental control and chemical industry.
Enllaç a la pàgina web del projecte / Link to your project website
Repte en que s’emmarca aquest projecte / Challenge within the framework of this project
Does not apply
