Cells-on-a-chip diabetic wound microfluidic platform to develop diagnostic tools and therapeutic treatments

Diabetes is a major disease in UK and based on recent reports, only in 2016, 3.6 million people have been diagnosed with diabetes, with an extra 1 million people undiagnosed that suffer from the disease. One of the dramatic effects of the disease are the diabetic wounds, which due to the problem of antimicrobial resistance get infected with resistant strains, with most prevalent Escherichia coli K1 and Staphylococcus aureus. If not detected early enough, wound infections can result in amputations. According to Diabetes UK, 4 out of 5 amputations can be prevented and treated if detected fast, since 80% of these begin as foot ulcers. Most of the diabetes research is based on animal-use. In this project, we want to avoid the use of animals and we therefore propose an alternative in vitro methodology: we aim to develop a cells-on-a-chip diabetic wound microfluidic platform, which will enable us to investigate in vitro different conditions/combinations of therapeutic methods against Escherichia coli K1 and Staphylococcus aureus. This platform will be used as a tool for diagnosis and therapeutic treatments against wound infection. A combination of bacteriophages targeting the above pathogens and antibiotics will be applied towards that direction.