Dr Krystyn Van Vliet on Using Engineered 3D Platforms to Identify Potential MS Drug Candidates

Krystyn Van Vliet, PhD, vice president for research and innovation at Cornell University's Meinig School of Biomedical Engineering, discusses using engineered 3D platforms to identify potential multiple sclerosis (MS) drug candidates.

She expanded upon the topic on March 1 at the Americas Committee for Treatment and Research in MS (ACTRIMS) Forum 2024 during the session, "Barriers to Neural Repair"; her presentation was titled, "Engineering 3D Platforms to Overcome Barriers of Drug Discovery for MS."

Transcript

Can you provide examples of successful applications of engineered 3D platforms in identifying potential therapeutic targets or drug candidates for MS?

There's actually been a few different approaches over the past 5 to 10 years to develop 3D platforms. The key, as I see it, is that you want those 3D platforms to be complex enough to have the features of the brain tissue environment, or the brain lesion environment, in multiple sclerosis but not so complex that you can't actually measure the key outcomes that you would need in drug discovery at scale and rapidly. You have to have a compromise between the engineering reproducibility and the biological complexity.

The way that we and others have been working on that is to use synthetic materials, nonbiological materials, to make these 3D constructs. It's not tissue engineering, we're not trying to grow new brain tissue; we're trying to have a simple enough environment that you approximate the key features that would affect cell and drug response.

Different approaches have included nanoscale electrospun fibers. These look like knots of tiny fibers and glass pillars that look like a pillar of material that cells might be able to engage and wrap around. Both of those approaches are very important in terms of having a 3D environment, but they're also much more stiff than the cells in your actual brain and the brain tissue.

What we've worked on to complement that approach is the 3D printing of polymers that have the stiffness of neurons, as well as the dimensions, the diameter and length span, of neurons. That way, you're not just making something that's engineered and simple, you're making something that has key features that we know affect the cell response and, therefore, the drug response in the brain.