On May, 26, 2025, researchers in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Texas A&M University announced they have developed a customizable vessel-chip method, enabling more accurate vascular disease research and a drug discovery platform to better capture the complex architecture of real human blood vessel.

Vessel-chips are engineered microfluidic devices that mimic human vasculature on a microscopic scale. These chips can be patient-specific and provide a non-animal method for pharmaceutical testing and studying blood flow. Jennifer Lee, a biomedical engineering master’s student, joined Dr. Abhishek Jain’s lab and designed an advanced vessel-chip that could replicate real variations in vascular structure.

Lee’s research was published in Lab on a Chip and came only a few years after her mentor and former biomedical engineering graduate student Dr. Tanmay Mathur designed the straight vessel-chip. Lee and Mathur conducted their research in the Bioinspired Translational Microsystems Laboratory under Jain, an associate professor and Barbara and Ralph Cox ’53 faculty fellow in the biomedical engineering department.

While this iteration of the vessel-chip improves physiological relevance, Jain and Lee hope to expand their research by including various cell types. Lee’s research currently only uses endothelial cells — or cells that make up the lining of the blood vessel — but they hope to include other cells to see the effects of their interactions with each other and blood flow.

The research was supported by the U.S. Army Medical Research Program, NASA, Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, National Institutes of Health, U.S. Food and Drug Administration, National Science Foundation, and Texas A&M University Office of Innovation Translational Investment Funds.