A Tissue-Engineered In Vitro Intestinal Wall Model for Assessing the Immunomodulatory Activity of the Human Gut Microbiota.

The development of in vitro models for screening the immunological activity of commensal bacteria in the human microbiota is a promising and highly relevant field of tissue engineering and experimental microbiology. This article describes a technology for fabricating a standardized, accessible, and easy-to-implement tissue-engineered in vitro model of the human intestinal wall. This model reproduces the physiologically relevant ratio of absorptive and mucin-producing enterocytes, while ensuring the spatial distribution and interaction of enterocytes and immune cells without the need for xenogeneic or synthetic scaffold materials. Exposure of the tissue-engineered intestinal model to E. coli O55:B5 LPS leads to the development of an inflammatory response, which was verified by changes in the expression level of the IL8 gene, encoding a key proinflammatory cytokine in dysbiosis. The developed tissue-engineered intestinal model can be used to screen for the immunomodulatory activity of commensal bacterial strains with potential organoprotective effects, as demonstrated by the example of the Opitutia bacterium KCR 482 strain.