Francisco Conceição, a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Liliana Moreira Teixeira at the UT, has been awarded a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Global Postdoctoral Fellowship. During the implementation of his project, he will be developing novel time-resolved sensors for Bone-on-Chip microfluidic applications, in a partnership with Su Ryon Shin from MIT/Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, United States.
With the increasing aging population in most developed countries, musculoskeletal disorders such as osteoporosis will become even more prevalent and represent a significant health and economic burden. Imbalanced bone remodeling is a common feature in osteoporosis, where bone degrading osteoclasts are overactive leading to increased bone degradation and fracture risk. Despite the need for novel therapies to rescue normal bone cell activity, assessing the efficacy of drug candidates is challenging due to a lack of accurate human model systems.
With this Marie Curie fellowship, Francisco will develop a human bone-on-chip model with integrated sensors for clinically relevant bone resorption biomarkers. He will build on the knowledge of the Shin Lab in biomarker sensors for inline monitoring of bone resorption activity. By combining with his ongoing research on the development of bone-on-chip models, this is a highly relevant stepping-stone towards improving the predictive potential of Organ-on-Chip tools for the study of osteoporosis and other bone diseases.
