Vascularizing Engineered Tissues

Featuring Steven George, M.D., Ph.D.

Professor, Biomedical Engineering and Chemical Engineering and Materials Science

Director, The Edwards Lifesciences Center for Advanced Cardiovascular Technology

The Henry Samueli School of Engineering, UC Irvine



Free and open to the public

Refreshments will be provided



For more information on seminar and Lifechips program, please visit www.lifechips.org.



Abstract:

Tissue engineering holds enormous potential to not only replace or restore function to a wide range of tissues, but also to capture and control three-dimensional physiology. Despite advances in materials for scaffolding, and stem cell preservation and differentiation, the most successful applications of implantable tissues have continued to be in thin (< 2mm) avascular tissues in which delivery of essential nutrients occurs primarily by diffusion. More complex organs or thicker connective tissue (>1cm) will only survive when implanted if the tissue is rapidly vascularized, thereby ensuring that all cells receive an adequate supply of oxygen and nutrients. The development of thick tissues beyond the diffusion limitation remains, perhaps, the greatest challenge facing the field of tissue engineering. Furthermore, while human capillaries can be grown in vitro, there are no three-dimensional models of human tissue which contain perfused capillaries. The past decade has brought tremendous advances in our understanding of new bollod vessel formation, providing a rich environment for innovative designs of vascularized engineered tissues for both implantation, and to understand three-dimensional physiology. This seminar will describe our approach for creting vascularized engineered tissue comprised of mature interconnected microvessel networks with supporting pericytes, including early results on in vitro microluidic platforms as well as in vivo performance.



About the Speaker:

Steven George, M.D., Ph.D., received his bachelors degree in chemical engineering in 1987 from Northwestern University, M.D. from the University of Missouri School of Medicine in 1991, and  Ph.D. from the University of Washington in chemical engineering in 1995.  He then joined the faculty at the University of California, Irvine.  His research interests include tissue engineering and pulmonary gas exchange with particular interest in vascularizing implantable tissues, linking optical and mechanical properties in fibrosis, physiological systems modeling, and exhaled nitric oxide in asthma.  His research program is currently supported by three grants the National Institutes of Health, and has previously been recognized by the NIH FIRST award in 1998 and the CAREER and Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) from the National Science Foundation in 1999.  He became the director of the Center for Biomedical Engineering in October, 2000, and served as the principal investigator of the Development Award from the Whitaker Foundation from 2000-2006. He was elected a fellow in the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) in 2007, and has published more than 60 peer-reviewed manuscripts.  He was the founding William J. Link Professor and Chair of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at UCI from 2002-2009. Most recently, he was appointed as the Edwards Lifesciences Professor and Director of the new Edwards Lifesciences Center Advanced Cardiovascular Technology.