Funded by: Rhode Island Institutional Development Award (IDeA) Network of Biomedical Research Excellence from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health
Dr. Jyothi Menon has begun to consider how her lab’s medical innovation could be leveraged to detect, research, and mitigate the effects of micro- and nanoplastics in the human body. Photo credit: Jason Jaacks.
Due to their ubiquitous nature, micro- and nano-plastics are being increasingly taken up by humans especially through occupational exposure, inhalation and ingestion. Microplastics have been found to accumulate and persist within human tissues upon ingestion. There is an urgent need to predictively study the fate as well as short-term and long-term effects of these contaminants following uptake by cells.
The Menon lab is developing novel tissue engineering-based approaches that are more representative of in vivo cell environments. These medical models can be leveraged to detect, research, and mitigate the effects of micro- and nanoplastics in the human body.
The areas of focus include:
- Development of biomimetic microwell arrays to generate 3D cell aggregates (spheroids) for high-throughput analysis of the impact of micro- and nanoplastics on cells in the body.
- 3D bioprinted tissue constructs and organs-on-chip to evaluate the accumulation and retention of micro- and nanoplastics in human cells and tissues under physiological conditions.