Abstract

Fibrosis is a pathological wound repair response which occurs through the accumulation of myofibroblasts in the extracellular matrix (ECM) rich lesions at the site of the wound. This leads to the irreversible formation of excessive scar tissue. In vitro assays for the development of anti-fibrotic agents are therefore of high value to drug discovery. However, mesenchymal cells typically produce collagens under standard 2D cell culture conditions which do not assemble into fibrils. Thus, historic assays were not disease relevant and low throughput. A recent publication (Good et al. 2019) described a pseudo-3D phenotypic assay to quantify mature fibrillar collagen deposition which is physiologically relevant and amenable to high throughput screening.

The poster will detail that we have successfully established the “scar-in-a-jar” assay and been able to recapitulate the hallmarks of fibrosis in this system.