Congrats to Prof. Pompano, who was appointed to the Director’s Board of the Chemical and Biological Microsystems Society. This Society organizes and sponsors the annual international microfluidics meeting, MicroTAS. See you at MicroTAS 2024 in Montreal!
Filtering by Author: Rebecca Pompano
NIH Challenge Fund Prize for human immune model
We are so honored that our team's idea won an NIH Complement-ARIE Challenge Prize!
“The National Institutes of Health has announced the winners of a crowdsourcing competition for innovative ideas on New Approach Methodologies, or NAMs to more accurately model human biology. The Complement Animal Research In Experimentation (Complement-ARIE) Challenge Prize competition offered $1,000,000 in total prize money to [twenty] diverse teams with ideas for new ways of using NAMs to conduct basic research, uncover disease mechanisms, and translate knowledge into products and practice.”
Our concept was an Organ-on-Chip system for Population Diversity in Responses to Vaccination, an area that we are passionate about exploring and look forward to opportunities to find funding for this exciting vision in the future.
A fantastic team came together for this idea:
Evangelia Bellas, Temple University
Aarthi Narayanan, George Mason University
Jennifer Munson, Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC
Chance John Luckey, University of Virginia Pathology
Rebecca Pompano, UVA Department of Chemistry and Biomedical Engineering
All of the Challenge Prize winning ideas sound very exciting to advance models of human biology. You can read them all here:
https://commonfund.nih.gov/complementarie/highlights/nih-announces-winners-complement-arie-challenge-competition
Two new preprints!
The Pompano lab has been busy at the start of 2024! Check out our two new preprints on BioRxiv:
Ozulumba et al
One on biomaterials for immune cell photo-patterning:
by Tochukwu Ozulumba et al
And one on a bioanalytical method to map out oxygen consumption and hypoxia in live tissue explants:
Spatially resolved quantification of oxygen consumption rate in ex vivo lymph node slices
by Parastoo Anbaei et al
Anbaei et al
We welcome feedback on these manuscripts and look forward to sharing the revised versions again after peer review!
New R01 awarded for models of Multi-Tissue Immunity
We are excited that our work to build multi-organ models of immunity will be funded for the next five years by a $2.4 million award from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health. This award will fund exciting collaborations with the Throckmorton lab at Drexel University and Drs. Melanie Rutkowski and Anne Sperling here at UVA!
Interested in what we are studying? Read on below.
Communication between the lymph node and the organs it drains is imperative for predicting immune responses to vaccination, infection, and chronic disease, but have been difficult to study in vivo or in vitro.
To address this gap, we will develop a user friendly, microscale system designed specifically to co-culture intact samples of live tissue from the lymph node with other organs, while allowing recirculation of white blood cells as occurs in vivo. After determining the effects of various modes of fluid motion on intact lymph node tissue for the first time, we will generate a simple model of the response of the murine lymph node to vaccination, as a proof-of-principle of this new system for modeling multi-tissue immunity outside the body.
Prof. Pompano named Shannon Mid-Career Fellow
Congratulations to Prof. Pompano, who was named in May 2023 as one of the inaugural class of Shannon Center Mid-Career Fellows at UVA! This fellowship recognizes “rising star” mid-career professors from across the university to receive additional research support and to form a community of Shannon fellows for the next three years.
Read more in the UVA Today article:
New Fellowship Program Recognizes 15 ‘Rising Star’ Faculty Members
New review article in Frontiers in Immunology!
Big congratulations to Dr. Tochukwu Ozulumba, Dr. Jennifer Ortiz Cárdenas, and Alyssa Montalbine for writing a wonderful review about models of the lymph node, now online at Frontiers in Immunology! This review captures the state of the art in in vitro, ex vivo, and computation models of lymph node function, as well as the associated challenges and opportunities. It is open access, so enjoy the read!
First paper of 2023! Easy fab bubble traps
Congrats to Hannah Musgrove, Amirus (Ovi) Saleheen, and Jon Zatorski on their latest paper, now published in Micromachines as part of the Womens Special Issue! To address the perennial problem of bubbles arising in the tubing of microfluidic cultures and organs-on-chip, they adapted a previously described, passive bubble trap design for fabrication by 3Dprinting or by high-throughput machining. These two fabrication methods enable reproducible, low-cost fabrication at moderate or large throughput, respectively. We share the design files in the linked Dataverse site, so feel free to try them out!
New paper: 3D printed microfluidic inlets
Congratulations to Hannah Musgrove on her second publication, which is part of the Chips & Tips blog associated with Lab on a Chip. She shares her elegant design for a robust, printable microfluidic port in the post, with detailed instructions. If you are or ever will be 3D printing plastic microfluidic chips, you've faced the chip-to-world problem. Hannah's design works well for SLA and DLP printing, including for small microfluidic tubing. This posting went through editorial review and revision, and we are delighted to share it.
Musgrove HB and Pompano RR. “Threadless chip-to-world connections on resin 3D printed microscale devices.” In Chips & Tips (2022), a curated open access blog associated with Lab on a Chip.
Celebration for Lavoisier
Yesterday we celebrated Research Scientist Dr. Lavoisier Akoolo (3rd from left, 2nd row), who is moving into a leadership role in UVA's Biorepository & Tissue Research Facility. He has been a part of our group since October 2020, and made significant contributions to our understanding of cell behavior in lymph node slices during long term culture. We will miss him and wish him the best in his new position!
We had a great time outside with ice cream and delicious treats home-made by Djuro and Jon. Yum!
New paper: Photopatterned 3D cultures in a chip
We are delighted that Jennifer Ortiz-Cardenas’s thesis work is now published in Organs-on-a-chip! Jenn established a method to micropattern cell-laden 3D cultures on a microfluidic chip, with resolution as good as 100-micron. She established everything from how to design and fabricate the PDMS chamber to avoid catching bubbles or patterning microcracks in the gel, to choosing what light source would provide the required wavelength, intensity, and columnation, to rigorously comparing the properties of two types of biomaterials in terms of patterning, and carefully establishing the capabilities and limitations of biocompatibility of this system with primary lymphocytes. Read the paper here! https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666102022000040
