Bugs4UrateOnAChip

The Bugs4urate original project proposes to understand how diet, glycans and the gut microbiome can influence urate metabolism, and to provide scientific evidence for the role of these factors in the treatment of hyperuricemia and the prevention of gout, using probiotics. The project is focused on in vivo studies that involve the recruitment of patients, which can lead to increased costs. Bugs4UrateOnAChip goes beyond the current state-of-the-art proposing the development of a pre-clinical platform representative of hyperuricemia allowing affordable and high-throughput screening of bioactives to identify the most promisor candidates to be tested in clinical trials, saving time and money and avoiding clinical fails and side effects on patients from non-efficacious treatments. The proposed platform brings the novelty of connecting three key stages of the gastrointestinal tract (GIT) – digestion, fermentation and intestinal epithelial cells – in independent chips that can be connected, allowing the study of specific queries of a stage, or setting up the complete GIT. The new tool can also serve at-risk patients for personalized treatment contrasting to the usual trial and error approach. INL aims to support pre-clinical studies getting the right treatment in place in a faster way. In addition, INL aims to develop innovative targeting delivery systems based on encapsulated probiotics to improve their survival rate and mucoadhesiveness and, consequently, their potential therapeutic effect. The performance of encapsulated probiotics will also be evaluated in vitro using a digestion-on-a-chip system developed at INL.