Blood Vessels-on-Chip to Understand and Target COVID-19

Project description When COVID-19 patients become seriously ill, they often have problems in their blood vessels. This is how we see leakage, inflammation and blood clotting. In this project, a mini-blood vessel based on human vascular wall tissue and COVID-19 patient plasma is used to study blood clot formation. It is not yet clear why vascular problems occur in COVID-19 and whether they offer starting points for treatments. Finding answers to these questions is made difficult because laboratory animals infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus do not develop complications in their blood vessels. It is therefore essential to perform this research using human tissues. In the project, researchers from the University of Twente will build and analyze the mini-blood vessels. Researchers from the Amsterdam UMC will collect and characterize the patient plasma for these models. Experts from the LUMC will perform molecular biological analysis on the cultured tissues.