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URMC / Labs / Ovitt Lab / Research Projects / Engineered Salivary Gland Tissue Chips

 

Engineered Salivary Gland Tissue Chips

tissue chip sphere

For more than 550,000 patients annually diagnosed with head and neck cancers worldwide, severe loss of salivary gland function (xerostomia) is an unavoidable outcome of radiation therapy. Efforts to discover effective radioprotective and regenerative strategies have been hampered by the inability to culture salivary gland secretory cells in vitro, due to loss of the secretory cell phenotype.

Tissue Chip MB

Utilizing novel microbubble (MB) array technology as a high-throughput, modular platform, we are focused on developing salivary gland tissue chips capable of long-term secretory function. The tissue chips will be used for screening FDA-approved drugs to identify effective radioprotective agents, which will undergo subsequent testing in vivo. This is a multi-PI project (Benoit, Delouise, Ovitt).

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