Engineering choroid plexus-on-a-chip with oscillatory flow for modeling brain metastasis

The human brain choroid plexus (ChP) is a highly organized secretory tissue with a complex vascular system and epithelial layers in the ventricles of the brain. The ChP is the body’s principal source of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and also functions as a barrier separating the blood from CSF, where the movement of CSF through the body is pulsatile in nature. It has been challenging to recreate the specialized architecture and dynamics of the ChP with a physiologically relevant microenvironment. Here, we recapitulated the ChP structure by developing a microfluidic chip with established design rules and CSF dynamics. Human ChP cells were cultured in the device with an engineered brain-specific extracellular matrix (ECM). The drug screening capabilities of our human ChP-on-a-chip were observed through physiologically relevant drug responses from breast cancer cells spread in the ChP. ChP immu…