Rapid Evaluation of Anti-inflammatory Effect of Geniopicroside

Abstract

Skin acts as a barrier and is an important part of body immune system. External physical, biochemical and other stimuli might cause skin inflammation. Drugs and cosmetics have been developed for skin inflammation treatment. At present, the tests of skin inflammation are mainly conducted on animal and 2D cell models. The former might bring problems such as ethics and authenticity, while the latter cannot fully represent the complex micro-environment of the human body. Microfluidic based Organ-on- a- chips technology provides a new method for drug and cosmetic ingredient screening. Skin-on-a-chip (SOC) has been designed for constructing <i>in vitro</i> skin models. In this paper, a SOC was developed to culture skin-like models <i>in vitro</i>. We tested the differentiation of SOC cultured skin model, and the results showed that its stratum corneum was well differentiated. It indicates that the skin tissue cultured by the SOC bears some similarities to human skin, which can be used for subsequent drug testing. We tested the anti-inflammatory effect of gentiopicroside and compared with dexamethasone. The results showed that 5μg/ml~50μg/ml of gentiopicroside had similar anti-inflammatory effect to 1μM of dexamethasone.