Scarred for Life

Our organs are packed with cells called fibroblasts, which spring into action to repair damaged tissue and heal wounds. But sometimes these fibroblasts become activated when they aren’t needed, forming stiff scarred patches. Known as fibrosis, this scarring turns up in lung disease, cardiovascular disease and cancer, and is implicated in nearly 45% of all deaths in developed countries. Fibrosis is currently incurable, and the limited success of treatments so far is partly due to the lack of effective laboratory tools for investigating the underlying biology and testing novel therapies. Researchers have now developed a new 3-dimensional cell culture technique for growing fibroblasts in the lab, which more accurately recapitulates the situation in living tissues. These 3-D cells (bottom row) have very different responses to a range of drugs compared with standard two-dimensional cultures (top), providing new insights into the process of fibrosis and the likely effectiveness of potential treatments.

Written by Kat Arney

Kat Arney

Writer

Dr Kat Arney is an award-winning science writer, broadcaster and public speaker, and is the founder and Creative Director of First Create The Media.

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• Image from work by Daniel L. Matera and colleagues
• Department of Biomedical Engineering and Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, M, USA
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)
• Published in Science Advances, September 2020