2022/12/09 | Events | In-vitro & Organs-on-Chip
Organs-on-Chip Technologies Seminar with Andries van der Meer.
Organs-on-chips are microfluidic cell culture models that capture aspects of organ-level functionality in controlled, dynamic systems. They are uniquely different from other cell culture models in that they are based on controlled microenvironment engineering. Therefore, they can capture progressively more complex physiological functions without relying on uncontrolled and unpredictable cellular self-organization [1]. The controlled nature of organs-on-chips also allows the systematic ‘personalization’ of various aspects of the model, so that it truly becomes a reflection of ourselves, and may be applied in targeted drug development and precision medicine [2]. In this talk, I will explain how we are applying this concept of systematic personalization as we engineer blood vessels for integration in organs-on-chips.
[1] Van der Meer, A. D., & Van den Berg, A. (2012). Organs-on-chips: breaking the in vitro impasse. Integrative Biology, 4(5), 461-470.
[2] Van Den Berg, A., Mummery, C. L., Passier, R., & Van der Meer, A. D. (2019). Personalised organs-on-chips: functional testing for precision medicine. Lab on a Chip, 19(2), 198-205.
Dr. Andries D. van der Meer is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Science and Technology of the University of Twente, The Netherlands. He leads a research team in the Applied Stem Cell Technologies department, coordinating multiple projects on the development and application of organ-on-chip technology. Dr. Van der Meer is scientific leader of the Organ-on-Chip Center Twente, affiliated with the MESA+ Institute for Nanotechnology and the Technical Medical Centre. Van der Meer is the European Organ-on-Chip Society (EUROoCS) elected vice-president and chair of the Focus Group on Standardization for Organ-on-Chip of the European standardization bodies CEN and CENELEC.
Before joining the University of Twente in 2015, Dr. Van der Meer worked as a Senior Research Fellow at Harvard Medical School and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering of Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA. He actively developed organ-on-chip models of the blood-brain barrier and the alveolus for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Microphysiological Systems program. Moreover, he coordinated a collaborative project between the Wyss Institute, its organ-on-chip start-up company Emulate, Inc. and Janssen Pharmaceuticals. Before joining Harvard University, Van der Meer was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Prof. Albert van den Berg’s BIOS/Lab-on-a-Chip group of the University of Twente, The Netherlands. During that time, he also served as an Assistant Coordinator for the project ‘Beyond Borders: Organs-on-Chips’ of the Dutch Royal Academy (KNAW). This project led to the founding of the Dutch Human Organ and Disease Model Technologies Organ-on-Chip consortium (hDMT). Dr. Van der Meer currently serves as the chair of the Consortium Assembly of this multi-center consortium.
Dr. Van der Meer obtained his Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Twente, The Netherlands in 2010, and received his M.Sc. degree in Medical Biology from the University of Groningen, The Netherlands in 2005.
