Vein-on-a-chip: An investigational tool for innovating sclerotherapy
Bottaro E., Paterson J., Zhang X., Hill M., Lewis AL., Millar T., Carugo D.
Sclerotherapy is currently employed to effectively treat varicose veins. It involves the injection of a sclerosing agent, which causes endothelial wall damage and vessel shrinkage. Pre-clinical in-vitro studies are conducted to characterize the performance of sclerosants; however, they often do not replicate physiologically relevant conditions. In this study, we adopted a bottom-up approach to develop robust models for pre-clinical testing of the mechanical and biological performance of sclerosing agents. Models comprised of (i) 2D in vitro cell monolayers, (ii) 3D vein-on-a-chip (VOC) to more closely replicate the vein architecture, and (iii) ex-vivo models to validate the VOCs (Fig. 1).