San Francisco. Metabolic disorders due to excessive nutrition are a pressing problem for the healthcare system of many countries in the world, since they are often associated with various serious diseases. In an article published in the journal PlosONE, the research team of the Piaggio Centre of the University of Pisa led by Professor Ahluwalia – director of the Centre – proposes a way to study the pathologies connected to obesity that has proved particularly effective precisely because it is based on a careful study of the human organism, whose functions are reproduced by engineered tissues”.Prof. Arti Ahluwalia explains that “the use of animal models for the study of metabolic disorders was the only existing method. However, it is a method that has its limitations because obesity is a purely human disorder that depends on diet and lifestyle and it is hardly reproducible in animals who rarely eat more than necessary”. The researchers at the Piaggio Centre have therefore developed an in-vitro system composed of multiple tissues (fat, liver, and vascular tissue) connected via microfluidic channels to study the onset of vascular damage and signs of systemic inflammation related to the increase of adipose tissues in quantities that correspond to weight gain and obesity in humans. The observed result was that tissue damage increases proportionally to the amount of fat, which paves the way to understanding the cellular mechanisms of tissue response to excess nutrition. (9Colonne)
