“Organ-Specific Microvascular Engineering towards Regeneration and Disease Modeling”

Seminar | November 15 | 12-1 p.m. | 290 Hearst Memorial Mining Building

 Ying Zheng, University of Washington

 Bioengineering (BioE)

Engineered tissues have emerged as promising new approaches to repair damaged tissues as well as to provide useful platforms for drug testing and disease modeling. Outstanding challenges remain in 1) the lack of well-defined and mature cell sources to facilitate translational outcomes and 2) the lack of control over vascular structure and perfusion efficiency in engineered 3D tissue constructs, preventing large-scale tissue fabrication, and leading to insufficient perfusion after implantation in vivo. In this talk, I will present recent progress in my lab in engineering microvasculature from human pluripotent stem cell derived endothelial cells, and their anastomosis in vitro and infarcted heart in vivo. The eventual goal of this drive is to use the single cell source to derive organ-specific vascular cells and tissue for regeneration. Next I will discuss our work in understanding the human microvascular endothelial cell heterogeneity from four major organs, heart, lung, liver and kidney and describe their distinct structure and function. I will show an example of using human kidney-specific microvascular cells to model kidney specific injury. Finally I will discuss challenges and future perspectives towards engineering human organ-specific tissue models.