Speaker
Description
The plan for tissue engineering has always been to deliver human tissue products that can repair, regenerate, and replace our organs. As far as the heart is concerned, that plan has been punched - hard - by reality (Cit. Mike Tyson). Through the lens of my post-doctoral research at Harvard, we will review advancements in heart muscle engineering and examine some of the fundamental roadblocks to its clinical translation. Specifically, we will see how simple bioengineering and image analysis tools can be used to establish unbiased and quantitative metrics of the phenotypic quality of stem cell-derived cardiac muscle cells. Further, we will see how techniques from biophysics can be used to provide a multiscale assessment of muscle contractility. Finally, we will examine how these tools can be expanded and leveraged into a new framework for cardiac tissue engineering where we stop “trying to build" a heart and we start "growing” one, instead. Round 2 with reality: ready, go!
20967802055
