2023/04/28 | Events | In-vitro & Organs-on-Chip
Organs-on-Chip Technologies Seminar with Prof. Dr. Alexander Mosig, Jena University Hospital.
The interaction of the microbiota with its host is crucial in the regulation and maintenance of physiological conditions of the human body. Deregulation of the host response and disbalance of microbial composition are directly associated with the development of a variety of diseases, including acute and chronic infections. However, much of our knowledge about the microbiome and its impact on human infections is based solely on descriptive and correlative studies. Current in vitro models lack the required complexity with major limitations for the long-term coculture of a living microbiota, whilst animal models have limitations in the translation to the human situation since the composition of the microbiome and the immune system considerably differs from the human situation.
Microphysiological systems (MPS) yet emerge as an attractive new platform for the coculture of a defined living microbiota with bioengineered tissue models emulating organotypic functions under well-controlled conditions. Immunocompetent organ models can emulate key aspects of the human immune response to microbial colonization or infection and allow studies with a scalable biological complexity up to systemic studies emulating microbial communities and cross-communication between multiple organ models.
In the talk, I will present examples of how we leverage MPS for studying mechanisms on how commensals and microbial-derive metabolites are capable to protect from infections and how bacterial pathogens such as Staphylococcus aureus could subvert immune cells to persist and disseminate by acquiring phenotypes that cause recurrent and persisting infections. I will focus on the lung, but also present data from gut and liver models used as infection models of viral, bacterial, and fungal pathogens and provide examples of how we combine biochemical and biophotonic techniques such as high-resolution microscopy with algorithm-based image analysis and in silico modeling to gain deeper insight into the pathogenesis of human infections.
Alexander Mosig studied Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and obtained his PhD in Cell Biology from the Friedrich Schiller University Jena. He is the independent research group leader of the INSPIRE lab at the Center for Sepsis Control and Care of the Jena University Hospital, focusing on studies on the orchestration of the human immune response by the microbiota in organ-specific environments. He is interested in mechanisms of host-pathogen interaction and its regulation by microbiota-associated metabolites in the context of dysbiosis and acute and chronic inflammatory diseases. An important topic of his work is developing and applying novel microphysiological systems to study these processes in vitro.
To join the seminar online please use:
https://unibe-ch.zoom.us/j/67525886942?pwd=TVFuZWVGb2lqUGFTSk1NbmIzUEVjZz09
Meeting ID: 675 2588 6942 Passcode: 639664
