Korea University · Engineering
Professor Nakwon Choi's research lab specializes in developing advanced in vitro models to mimic the complex microenvironments of the human brain, with a focus on brain tumors, neurodegenerative diseases, and neural tissue function. The lab integrates bioengineered platforms such as 3D organoids, brain-on-a-chip systems, and decellularized extracellular matrix (dECM) hydrogels to enable high-fidelity modeling of neural physiology, including blood-brain barrier function and cell-cell interactions. Their work emphasizes the creation of physiologically relevant, high-content platforms for drug screening, disease modeling, and understanding neurological pathologies at the cellular and molecular levels.
Figures are computed from collected data and may differ slightly.
Transcriptional profiling, which is directly or indirectly associated with expressed protein levels, has been used in various applications including clinical prognosis and pharmaceutical investigation of drug activities. Although the widely used reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) allows for the quantification of absolute amounts of mRNA (mRNA) from inputs as small as a single cell, it is an indirect detection method that requires the amplification of cDNA copies of target m
Since the advent of organ-on-a-chip, many researchers have tried to mimic the physiology of human tissue on an engineered platform. In the case of brain tissue, structural connections and cell-cell interactions are important factors for brain function. The recent development of brain-on-a-chip is an effort to mimic those structural and functional aspects of brain tissue within a miniaturized engineered platform. From this perspective, we provide an overview of trace of brain-on-a-chip developmen
Abstract Physiologically, brain tumors interact with surrounding vascular and glial cells, and change their responses to survive in brain tissue‐specific microenvironments. A major difficulty in brain tumor treatment is caused by the organism's high resistance to pharmaceutical drugs and poor blood–brain barrier (BBB) penetration. Therefore, mimicking the physiological environment of brain tumors on in vitro platforms can aid in predicting the cellular response to drugs. Here, an engineered 3D h
Neurodegenerative diseases are a group of disorders characterized by progressive degeneration of the structural and functional integrity of the central and peripheral nervous systems. Millions of people suffer from degenerative brain diseases worldwide, and the mortality continues to increase every year, causing a growing demand for knowledge of the underlying mechanisms and development of therapeutic targets. Conventional 2D-based cell culture platforms and animal models cannot fully recapitula
To mimic the brain tissue microenvironment in vitro, the biological and structural properties of the utilized system must be similar to those of the native brain in the microenvironment in vivo. To promote the bioactive (biological) properties of matrix hydrogels, we used the decellularized extracellular matrix (dECM) of porcine brain, which was found to enhance neuronal differentiation/outgrowth and neuron-to-brain dECM interactions. To implement the desired structural properties, we aligned mi
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