From single cells to artificial micro-organs on chip

Dr. Matthias Meier (IMTEK, University of Freiburg)

Within this bioengineering and medical systems biology project we will engineer a microfluidic chip platform to create synthetic microenvironments for micro-organs. In particular we will focus on prostate spheres, which are regarded as progenitor of the complete organ. With help of the bioengineering tools we aim to characterize signaling pathways, and transcriptional profiles of stem cell niches with single cell resolution. The close cooperation between the clinics and applied science should lead to new application in personal cancer diagnostics.