Decoding Inflammatory Bowel Disease – on a chip
Peer-Reviewed Publication
Updates every hour. Last Updated: 23-Jun-2026 05:16 ET (23-Jun-2026 09:16 GMT/UTC)
IBD, which comprises the inflammatory conditions Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, affects about 1.6 million Americans, many of whom cannot be effectively treated. This mostly is due to a lack in understanding of what exactly causes the increased inflammation, fibrosis, and compromised intestinal barrier that underlie this disease and its manifold symptoms.
A new study, published in Nature Biomedical Engineering and led by Wyss Founding Director Donald Ingber, developed donor-specific microfluidic Organ Chip models of colon that replicate major hallmarks of IBD in vitroin an unprecedented way. Their approach pinpointed new drivers of IBD progression and, for the first time, demonstrated a direct impact of pregnancy hormones on IBD severity in female IBD patient chips and recapitulated the enhanced initiation of cancer formation in IBD tissues.
Hair, nails, and horns, all made up of keratin, are some of the hardest and most resilient structures in animals. Inside zebrafish cells, keratin plays a distinct role, giving them the strength they need to move together as a coherent tissue while modulating the driving forces behind their movement during early development. But what happens when keratin is missing? A new study from the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA), published in Nature Communications, reveals how crucial this protein is for life itself.
Planned early birth for pregnant women with high blood pressure cuts maternal complications by nearly half and reduces the risk of stillbirth, without increasing the likelihood of caesarean section, according to a new Cochrane review.
A new study shows that Atlantic herring adapted to the Baltic Sea’s low-salinity waters through precise genetic changes that affected sperm, eggs and early embryos, offering a rare, detailed look at evolution in action.
Juvenile Chinook salmon in the Lower Fraser River estuary are feeding and growing in a slurry of contaminants from pharmaceuticals, personal care products to industrial chemicals, according to a new Simon Fraser University study.
Researchers found more than 200 contaminants in water and fish tissue samples collected from five sites in the Lower Fraser River estuary, including common blood pressure and diabetes medications, antidepressants, caffeine and cocaine.
“We’ve shown there’s a mixture of chemicals in the Lower Fraser, which not only presents potential risks to juvenile Chinook, but also other aquatic life,” says Bonnie Lo, environmental scientist and lead author of the study.