In our 3Rs Training Webinar on Thursday, March 14th, 2024 at 1 pm New York/ 6 pm London/ 7 pm Berlin, Elena Kromidas from the µOrganoLab at University of Tübingen, Germany, will talk about three 3D-tissue models of the cervix she developed.
Worldwide, women suffer from diseases affecting the cervix, including infections and malignant transformations. Leveraging microfabrication techniques and tissue engineering, three 3D-tissue models of the cervix were developed in an Organ-on-Chip platform. Long-term cultivation and perfusion allowed for treatment at patient-relevant doses and schedules or neutrophil integration, emphasizing the applicability of the models for basic mechanistic research and drug development.
Elena Kromidas pursued Technical Biology at the University of Stuttgart and completed her studies with her master’s thesis in Boston, where she investigated a proteasomal inhibitor for treating cervical cancers at Harvard Medical School. During her internship at Boehringer Ingelheim, she explored various transfection and transduction strategies for target validation studies. After joining Peter Loskills’ μOrganoLab, Elena specialized in the development of in vitro models of the healthy cervix, as well as neoplastic and cancerous variants, employing Organ-on-Chip technology. In addition to designing and fabricating the microfluidic platform, she dedicated her efforts to tissue engineering of multicellular 3D tissues that replicate human (patho)physiological tissue architecture, primarily utilizing cervical and immune cells derived from human donors.