BME Seminar Series (Zoom): Microfluidic Modeling of Regenerative Therapies for Retinal Degeneration

Zoom: https://uci.zoom.us/j/95801011310 Password: 239488

Abstract: Contemporary regenerative therapies have investigated the transplantation of retinal stem cells to replace damaged neurons and modulate glial scarring. Retinal neurons and glia respond to insults and imbalance in the retinal microenvironment via changes in morphology, adhesion and migratory behaviors. Many endogenous, gliotic responses can be neuro-protective or neuro-degenerative depending upon the disease and its state. Our work builds bioengineering systems that combine microfluidics with whole eye explants to examine the behaviors of transplantable cells and modulate their neuro-protective responses to externally applied stimuli. Moreover, variance in neural cell population densities, and their respective subtypes, has been recently implicated as a biological contributor to differences in neural self-repair. The broader impact of our studies is to quantitatively incorporate these types of data to promote development of new retinal therapies that remove health disparities in vision loss among U.S. adults.

Bio: Maribel Vazquez is a professor of biomedical engineering at Rutgers University. She began her career in industry as a microfabrication engineer and then completed a doctor of science in mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As a new faculty, she became a co-founder of the first Department of Biomedical Engineering at a Minority Serving Institution in her home state of New York. Her research develops microfluidic systems to correlate cellular responses with altered signaling pathways across a range of bio-applications, including repair of the central, visual and peripheral nervous systems. Her most recent projects focus on cell replacement therapies in the adult retina and have integrated community health projects to raise awareness and address the profound health disparities in adult vision loss across the United States.