Biological barriers are responsible for the maintenance of the homeostasis of the surrounded tissue and act as communication interface between the “outer world”, body fluids and organs. The major components of biological barriers are endothelial or epithelial cells. The functionality is determined by physical, transport and metabolic barrier components which control the transport of molecules and the transfer of signals across the barrier. These functions are highly regulated by the microenvironment of the biological barriers and altered in several diseases. These changes are causally linked with disease progressions and have manifold consequences for pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics of molecules and the development of therapeutic strategies targeting biological barriers. We offer over 15 years of experience with models of biological barriers such as the blood-brain barrier or the epithelia of the lung, kidney, oral mucosa or intestine. The broad application fields and our cutting-edge technologies are described in the next paragraphs in detail.

Research offers and services

• Biomarker research – identification and assessment of relevance and causality of novel biomarkers
• Disease models for e.g. inflammation, cerebral ischemia
• Development of novel (human) disease models
• Development and evaluation of novel therapeutic strategies
• Drug transport studies
• Nanoparticle, liposomal or protein (incl. biopharmaceutics) transport studies
• Transport studies with chemicals, toxins, ingredients of cosmetics or biomarker molecules
• Toxicity studies with chemicals, environmental toxins, drugs, ingredients of either cosmetics or food
• Effects of compounds on functional barrier properties (paracellular, transport or metabolic barrier)
• Long-term studies in dynamic hollow-fiber models for e.g. chronic studies with physiological concentrations of stimuli or active compounds
• Cell-cell communication studies
• Cell adherence or transmigration studies
• Elucidation of species differences (on request)

We offer over 15 years of experience with models of biological barriers such as the blood-brain barrier or the epithelia of the lung, kidney, oral mucosa or intestine. Biological barriers are responsible for the maintenance of the homeostasis of the protected tissue and act as communication interface between the “outer world”, body fluids and organs. The major components of biological barriers are endothelial or epithelial cells. The function of biological barriers is highly regulated by its microenvironment such as adjacent cells or also physical forces such as shear stress of applied by blood flow. For biomarker research biological barriers play a pivotal role to understand the origin of the biomarker and consequently the causality between the found biomarker and the correlated disease status. On the one hand molecular biomarkers from tissues have to cross biological barriers in order to be detectable within body fluids, on the other hand biological barriers could be sources for biomarkers itself.

The functionality of biological barriers is altered in several diseases, for example changes of the blood-brain barrier are reported for almost every known CNS-related disease (Alzheimer’s disease, stroke, traumatic brain injury, multiple sclerosis, epilepsy, pain, brain tumour, Parkinson disease, bacterial and viral infections, ALS, hypertension, lysosomal storage diseases). Currently, it is discussed that functional alterations are causally linked to disease progressions, and therefore several therapeutic strategies targeting biological barriers are under development. These barrier changes can also alter the pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics of drugs or drug candidates. Therefore, it is essential to work with validated disease models already in the drug development phase in order to obtain reliable preclinical data or to use the models to investigate and understand the underlying mechanisms. Moreover, it is important to consider species differences, therefore human models of biological barriers are needed to improve the data translatability from animal models to the human via e.g. human in vitro models of biological barriers. The variety of applications and research fields using in vitro models of biological barriers is huge.