Title: Engineering vascular endothelial cells and microphysiological system to support organ and tissue function
Abstract: The vasculature plays a critical role during embryogenesis to guide tissue growth and patterning. After birth, vascular networks continue to regulate organ function by delivering nutrients and gases and serving as stem cell niches in homeostasis and regeneration. In pathological contexts such as cancer, aberrant vascular signaling enables tumor growth, invasion, and metastasis. These observations underscore the need for biomimetic vascular models that can recapitulate vascular-tissue resident cell interactions in both development and disease.
In the first part of this talk, I will discuss my work on engineering 3D biomimetic blood vessels to investigate fundamental mechanisms of blood vessel formation in a controlled microenvironment. I will further demonstrate how these vascular models can be integrated within a microphysiological system to study tumor-blood vessel interactions during pancreatic cancer invasion.
Recent advances in vascular biology have revealed that endothelial cells (ECs) provide essential organ-specific cues that regulate stem cell maintenance, differentiation, and tissue function. However, primary adult ECs often lose their intrinsic capacity in vitro to robustly form vascular networks and dynamically interact with stem and parenchymal cells in co-culture, limiting their utility for modeling development, regeneration, and disease.
To overcome this limitation, I will present my work on transcriptional programming approaches to engineer adult ECs with robust capacity to form stable vessels and engage in functional crosstalk with various cell types. To demonstrate the utility of these engineered ECs, I will describe the development of a vascularized human liver model in which the engineered ECs support vascularization and sustain the function of primary human hepatocytes within microfluidic devices. I will also highlight extensions of this platform to additional stem cell-relevant tissues, including colon, pancreas, and bone marrow models, where engineered vasculature supports function, and cell-cell communication.
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https://uwmadison.zoom.us/j/91814162149?pwd=AYgwgbFNekOLHyQrj7wUCkxem9b2Yw.1
Meeting ID: 918 1416 2149
Passcode: 970506