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Blood vessels are like big-city highways; full of curves, branches, merges, and congestion. Yet for years, lab models replicated vessels like straight, simple roads.

To better capture the complex architecture of real human blood vessels, researchers in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Texas A&M University have developed a customizable vessel-chip method, enabling more accurate vascular disease research and a drug discovery platform.

Vessel-chips are engineered microfluidic devices that mimic human vasculature on a microscopic scale. These chips can be patient-specific and provide a non-animal method for pharmaceutical testing and studying blood flow. Jennifer Lee, a biomedical engineering master's student, joined Dr. Abhishek Jain's lab and designed an advanced vessel-chip that could replicate real variations in vascular structure.

"There are branched vessels, or aneurysms that have sudden expansion, and then stenosis that restricts the vessel. All these different types of vessels cause the blood flow pattern to be significantly changed, and the inside of the blood vessel is affected by the level of shear stress caused by these flow patterns," Lee said. "That's what we wanted to model."

Lee's research was published in and came only a few years after her mentor and former biomedical engineering graduate student Dr. Tanmay Mathur designed the straight vessel-chip. Lee and Mathur conducted their research in the Bioinspired Translational Microsystems Laboratory under Jain, an associate professor and Barbara and Ralph Cox '53 faculty fellow in the biomedical engineering department. The research will also feature on the cover of the May 2025 issue of the journal.

"We can now start learning about vascular disease in ways we've never been able to before," Jain said. "Not only can you make these structures complex, you can put actual cellular and tissue material inside them and make them living. These are the sites where vascular diseases tend to develop, so understanding them is critical."

Lee entered Jain's lab as an undergraduate honors student seeking research experience. Lee said she didn't know much about the organs-on-a-chip platform but became interested in its potential to shape the future of medicine. As she transitioned into graduate studies, Lee developed an interest in vessel-chips and joined the Master of Science fast-track program to continue her newfound passion for research.

"Jennifer demonstrated perseverance, curiosity, and creativity and started taking up research projects very quickly. Our fast-track program enables students like Jennifer to take on sort of high-impact, high-risk research and not just do a science project, but take it all the way to its outcome and get it published," Jain said.

While this iteration of the vessel-chip improves physiological relevance, Jain and Lee hope to expand their research by including various cell types. Lee's research currently only uses endothelial cells—or cells that make up the lining of the blood vessel—but they hope to include other cells to see the effects of their interactions with each other and blood flow.

"We are progressing and creating what we call the fourth dimensionality of organs-on-a-chip, where we not only focus on the cells and the flow, but this interaction of cells and flow in more complex architectural states, which is a new direction in the field," Jain said.

In addition to research experience, Lee has gained a multitude of soft skills and the ability to apply concepts learned in class to a real-world experience.

"It's such a good environment to interact with not only peers but also graduate students and postdoctoral researchers," she said. "You're able to learn teamwork and communication, work ethic, and just trying different things out. I think it's such a valuable experience that students have available. We have such good faculty research labs."