Advanced Healthcare Materials
celebrates its 5th birthday this year! Since 2012 we have been bringing you the latest breakthroughs in biomedical materials science with a strong focus on improving human health, and we will continue to do so in 2017. We therefore have launched virtual issues on five hot topics in the field, where you can access some of our best recent papers free of charge!
No access to our published content yet? Make sure to recommend Advanced Healthcare Materials to your librarian. More information can be found here.
In this monthly feature, we highlight some of the most read Advanced Healthcare Materials publications over the last month. These top-downloaded articles are therefore currently freely accessible! Click on the titles below to get to the corresponding papers. Also check out our cover art feature and our previous Most Read.
3D Miniaturization of Human Organs for Drug Discovery
by Joseph Park, Isaac Wetzel, Didier Dréau, and Hansang Cho
Current drug discovery approaches rely on a variety of in vitro and preclinical models to assess potential drug candidates, yet too often these models are inaccurate and lead to high rates of failure in clinical trials. Hangsang Cho and colleagues from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte provide a comprehensive review of three-dimensional culturing models that better recapitulate the complex behaviors of tissues and organs in vivo. They describe three of the leading technologies for these models – organoids, microfabrication, and bioprinting – and offer an outlook on the challenges and future prospects of miniaturized organ systems. Such advances may significantly reduce the costs and development time for drug development.
Three-Dimensional Models of the Human Brain Development and Diseases
by Mehdi Jorfi, Carla D’Avanzo, Doo Yeon Kim, and Daniel Irimia
Mehdi Jorfi, Daniel Irimia, and co-workers at Harvard Medical School discuss the progress, advantages, limitations, and future directions of 3D cell culture systems for modeling human brain development and diseases. The complexity of brain physiology makes it challenging to model neurological disorders. Simple in vitro models have been very useful for control measurements, but are limited in their ability to replicate more complex interactions between various brain cells. Recently, advances in the development of sophisticated 3D brain culture models have begun to recapitulate various aspects of human brain physiology in vitro, and replicate basic disease processes such as Alzheimer’s disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and microcephaly.
In Vitro Microfluidic Models for Neurodegenerative Disorders
by Tatsuya Osaki, Yoojin Shin, Vivek Sivathanu, Marco Campisi, and Roger D. Kamm
This review by Roger Kamm et al. from Massachusetts Institutes of Technology describes the latest advances in modelling neurodegenerative diseases on a chip, such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). The authors illustrate critical features of these biomimetic systems to be useful for drug discovery and toxicity testing. They also discuss current limitations and strategies to overcome them, to uncover novel biological mechanisms of currently incurable diseases.
Interested in more news about Advanced Healthcare Materials? Also check out our cover art feature and our previous Most Read.
We recently have released a top-level special issue on biomimetic interfaces in biomedical devices.
Discover our new virtual issues now too and read selected articles on nanotherapeutics, regenerative medicine, biofabrication, stem cells, and diagnostic devices for free.
