Remodeling of vascular network in biological systems
Organisms form a highly efficient vascular network to carry oxygen and nutrients to cells throughout the body with limited cardiac pump power. In engineering design as well, efficient pumping of heat and substances to a given area with a small amount of pump power is a major issue.
By learning from organisms and understanding their structure and formation process, we may find an efficient channel network structure that is completely different from what humans have thought of. Therefore, we start by observing living things.
Culturing cells on a microchip and observing the state of blood vessel formation (joint research with the Max Planck Institute/Nakayama Laboratory in Germany and the University of Tokyo Research Institute/Matsunaga Laboratory), because the embryo is transparent, we are observing a "zebrafish" that allows live imaging. (Collaboration with the National Center for Cardiovascular Diseases) In the first stage of vascular network formation in vivo, a random vascular network is formed in order to spread blood flow in the tissue. After that, the vascular endothelial cells that make up the blood vessels recognize important blood vessels and non-important blood vessels, the important blood vessels become thick and stable, and unnecessary blood vessels retract and disappear, thereby creating a hierarchical and ordered vascular network. A unique pattern will appear. Here, it is important how the living body distinguishes important blood vessels from unnecessary blood vessels. If we can formulate it, we believe that it can be applied to engineering systems, and we are conducting research.
It is known that vascular network abnormalities also occur in cancer and various diseases, and if a method for formulating the process of angiogenesis and changing it to a desired structure can be clarified, the development of new therapeutic methods may be possible.
Optimization of flow network in biological system
Reference: Hasegawa & Nakayama (2019)
3D Reconstruction of Zebrafish brain vasculature
Yellow line: center line of each vessel
White dot: Node on each centerline, Red dot: branching point, Blue dot: end point
(Collaboration with Dr. Hiroyuki Nakajima at National Cerebral and Cardiovascular Center)
Poster
