·Reconstituting Organ-Level Periodontal Soft Tissue on a Chip

Periodontitis, as the most common chronic inflammatory disease which causes oral dysfunction, is also closely related to atherosclerosis, Alzheimer's disease, ischemic stroke and other small vessel brain diseases. Now, we describe a biomimetic microsystem that reconstitutes the critical functional epithelium-capillary interface of the human Periodontal soft tissue. The main cells constituting the periodontal soft tissue barrier, gingival epithelial cells and vascular endothelial cells, are integrated on a microfluidic chip platform to simulate the in vivo microenvironment with the microfluidic technology characteristics. We developed a multifunctional microdevice that reproduces key structural, functional, and mechanical properties of the human epithelium-capillary interface, meanwhile, it realized the functional verification of the periodontal soft tissue physiological model. The establishment of this platform is expected to become the basis for the construction of periodontal soft tissue and other organ chip combined bionic models, in order to obtain a new platform for the research of human vital organ diseases caused by periodontal soft tissue inflammation.