Giovanni Andrea Micheli
Development of an Organ-on-Chip to study the links between diabetes, hypertension and related cardiovascular disease
Giovanni Andrea graduated with a degree in Biomedical Engineering from the Politecnico di Milano and has been a PhD Student at MERLN since the end of 2017. During his master thesis, conducted in part in Milan and in part at Brown University, he developed an interest in tissue engineering.
His research at MERLN is in collaboration with the MUMC Department of Internal Medicine, and aims at unravelling some of the more complicated links that associate insulin resistance, type II diabetes mellitus and cardiovascular conditions generally associated with the metabolic syndrome. To achieve his research goals he is developing an organ-on-chip platform to mimic medium-small blood vessels. With this platform he hopes to shed light on the biological interplay between endothelial, smooth muscle and perivascular adipose cells, and how this interplay may lead to the development of pathological conditions in lieu of insulin resistance and endothelial cell dysfunction.
