Review of diabetes modeling highlights the potential of creating 3D tissue platforms

Diabetes mellitus (DM) effects over 460 million people globally and is characterized by impaired glucose metabolism due to pancreatic islet cell dysfunction. DM often has severe complications and represents a growing financial burden because of serious long-term consequences.

Prevailing experimental approaches utilize mainly rodent animal models, but these techniques fail to represent the pathology of DM in humans. Humans and rodents have different islet characteristics and immune responses, meaning the translation of results from such models to humans remains controversial.

Kim and Jang present a review of 3D in vitro tissue platforms for studying and modeling DM, demonstrating a diverse range of engineering approaches have significant future potential. 3D hierarchical tissue production requires specific cell organization to simulate human tissue architecture and have been created by combining biofabrication and tissue engineering strategies.

“To capture in vivo-like responses of diabetic tissues, developing a hierarchical tissue construct is key,” said co-author Myungji Kim. “Researchers must consider compositions of cell, biomaterials and diverse biofabrication strategies to generate mature target tissue for DM modeling in vitro.”

The authors emphasize future studies using biomaterials, such as a tissue-derived extracellular matrix, which maintains tissue-specific composition, can be used to recreate organ microenvironments and 3D tissue platforms for DM research.

The authors hope future research uses these findings to fabricate sophisticated in vitro platforms for DM research.

“3D physiomimetic tissue platforms could be used in the future for discovering and developing personalized pharmacotherapies,” said Kim. “Current challenges could be overcome using these innovative engineering techniques.”

Source: “Construction of 3D hierarchical tissue platforms for modeling diabetes,” by Myungji Kim and Jinah Jang, APL Bioengineering (2021). This article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0055128 .

This paper is part of the Functional Biomaterials Collection, learn more here .