Estrela Neto: EMBL Advanced Training Centre Corporate Partnership Programme Fellowship

Estrela Neto has been awarded by the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) an EMBL Advanced Training Centre Corporate Partnership Programme Fellowship to present her work during the Conference Series Microfluidics 2014 (23-25 July 2014, Heidelberg, Germany)

Title: Sensorial innervation and bone cells: the treasured relation disclosed in microfluidic platforms

Authors: Estrela Neto, Diogo Paramos, Diana silva, Daniela Sousa, Cecília Alves, Inês Alencastre, Paulo Aguiar and Meriem Lamghari.

Compartmentalized microfluidic devices have strong potential for applications at the interface of a largely number of fields and can be used as coculture platforms to re-create whole systems and study several biological processes.
The innervation process has been recently pointed out as a hot topic during bone development and regeneration. Nevertheless, the intercommunication between both systems is barely understood. Therefore, given the importance of innervation in bone microenvironment and the lack of adequate tools to study the interaction, we propose to explore and validate the compartmentalized microfluidic devices for the coculture of neuronal and non-neuronal cells.

This work was financed by FEDER funds through the COMPETE and by Portuguese funds through FCT in the framework of the projects PEst‐C/SAU/LA0002/2011 and PTDC/BIM-MED/1047/2012. EN is recipient of PhD fellowships SFRH/BD/81152/2011.