FAQ

When working with the Gut-on-Chip, does it matter if you take cells from the urine or blood of people newly diagnosed with coeliac disease and not on a gluten free diet or people who have been diagnosed for a long time and are on a strict gluten free diet? Would the model work the same or differently?

We don't think that the origin of the cells used to make the gut-on-chip matters very much, but we are still working on making the comparisons at a molecular level. The science behind this is fairly new, so there are many things to learn. We don't think that the time of diagnosis or diet has a great direct effect on how the gut-on-chip behaves after extracting cells from these patients and 'converting' them to the gut-on-chip. However, we do think that the genes of patients may have an effect. Not all coeliac patients have the same genetic background, so some patients may have a genetic background that acts on the gut barrier more strongly. This we also hope to measure with the gut-on-chip by extracting cells from patients with different genetic backgrounds. These differences are of great interest to us!

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