Yong Yang, an assistant chemical engineering professor at West Virginia University’s Benjamin M. Statler College of Engineering and Mineral Resources, is creating a system that mimics the human brain’s cell function to help unlock the clues to curing Alzheimer’s disease.
It’s an in vitro system – an artificial environment occurring outside a living organism – funded by a $175,000 grant from the National Science Foundation. But more than a working model, it is a bridge to a more precise way of studying the formation of amyloid plaques, which trigger Alzheimer’s and other diseases of the brain.
Scientists traditionally have studied human brain cells in culture dishes, such as plastic Petri dishes and tested treatments on animals. But a system similar to human function is necessary to help analyze plaque and, eventually, discover which drugs best combat the disease, Yang said.
“We know about the formation of amyloid plaque in the brain by studying animal models,” Yang said. “For humans, we’re still not clear how it happens and we cannot perform tests directly on humans. We need something similar to the human body with which we can do some of the drug testing. That’s a key.”
Still in its conceptual stage, the model will incorporate an elastic material that is much softer than that found in a culture dish, comparable to the material of a contact lens. It will contain micro scale channels, each 50 microns in depth, or roughly 50 percent of the width of a human hair, that will simulate the flow of fluids in the human body. The design of a variety of nanoscale features will enable scientists to study different cell behavior within a single model.
