Accelerate Osteoarthritis Research Studies with Simple Western

Congratulations to Dr. Mario Rothbauer who is now the proud owner of an Abby! Hear how our Abby Competition winner Mario and his team plan to utilize the Simple Western™ instrument to accelerate protein analysis within their musculoskeletal disease research.

An Interdisciplinary Approach to Musculoskeletal Disease Modeling

Based at the Karl Chiari Lab for Orthopedic Biology at the Medical University of Vienna, the post-doc researcher intends to use the Abby alongside his unique, interdisciplinary approach to developing animal-free organ-on-a-chip models that accurately emulate the complexity and multi-faceted presentation of human inflammatory diseases.

Rothbauer has been building up a research team over the last couple of years to investigate the pathogenesis of musculoskeletal diseases, with a particular interest in creating more predictive animal-free models for rheumatoid (RA) and osteoarthritis (OA). Despite decades of research, the mechanisms underlying RA and OA disease onset and development are poorly understood, with only a few disease modifying drugs available for RA and none for OA. With frequently used in vitro cellular models typically being 2D in nature and lacking crucial factors found in vivo, Mario and his team aim to recapitulate the complexity of human arthritic diseases with the development of novel, physiological, 3D cell culture models and consequently increase translational power in the development of disease-modifying treatments.

Too Many Samples, Too Little Time

With an abundance of osteoarthritis patient samples, the team was experiencing a bottleneck within protein analysis. The demand for automation became apparent; the key to faster results, keeping up with sample workload and reducing user error. So, Mario put forward their research with the hope to give his small but mighty team the gift of time to tackle the bigger research questions and leave the chemiluminescent western blot system to what it does best.

'The introduction of an Abby will enable us to answer important questions quicker, such as identifying the disease driving mechanism and molecules surrounding osteoarthritis. Moving away from the tedious manual western blotting process, which can take up to two days, and introducing automation will speed up time to data and provide increased sensitivity and accuracy. We are excited to get started with the Abby and plan to run our first sample on the most complex organoid model we have! I am positive that we will be successful with this new analysis approach, and I am eager to see how the results obtained will help to drive our research forward.’ Mario added.