Topic: Tumor Necrosis Factor alpha

S100B is a calcium-binding protein concentrated in astrocytes in the Central Nervous System. It is regarded to act as a Damage-Associated Molecular Pattern molecule (for review, 1) and, in this respect, it has also been shown to actively participate in neuroinflammatory processes accompanying Experimental Automimmune Encephalomyelitis (EAE), a recognized animal model for Multiple Sclerosis. In fact both inhibition of S100B activity using pentamidine and of S100B astrocytic synthesis using arundic acid ameliorated clinical and pathologic parameters of the disease (2-4). This study further goes

Physiologically relevant human in vitro models of the BBB are essential to improve our understanding of its function in health and disease, identify novel drug targets, and assess potential new therapies. We present a BBB-on-a-chip model comprising human brain microvascular endothelial cells (HBMECs) cultured in a microfluidic platform that allows parallel culture of 40 chips. In each chip, a perfused HBMEC vessel was grown against an extracellular matrix gel in a membrane-free manner. BBBs-on-chips were exposed to varying concentrations of pro-inflammatory cytokines tumor necrosis factor alph