Tissue Engineering

• Soft Tissue Engineering
• Miniature 3D Liver-on-a-Chip

Soft Tissue Engineering

Soft tissue injuries (i.e. skin, muscles, tendons, ligaments, fascia) are the most common and can be the most detrimental injuries that can occur. 200,000 patients annually suffer from anterior cruciate ligament tears resulting in a $17.7B cost per year. Dental implants (300,000 patients annual) and knee joint replacements (640,000 patients annually) costing about $8.6B and $10.2B per year, respectively. About 1M central nervous system injury incidents occur annually costing about $53B per year. All of these soft tissues and their subsequent implants require a biomaterial that can adhere in wet conditions (i.e. blood).

The goal of our research is to engineer an advanced and multi-functional preformed biomaterials which can adhere in wet environments, improve cell survival, direct angiogenesis and provide a suitable 3D biomimetic microenvironment for tissue regeneration and biointegration, be highly compressible and injectable for minimally invasive surgical implantations.

Miniature 3D Liver-on-a-Chip

 We are developing biomimetic macroporous scaffolds-integrated biochips intended to model accurately the structure and function of the extracellular liver tissues microenvironment within a microfluidic device.

Our microfluidic in vivo-like 3D extracellular milieu are cellularized with hepatocytes to perform dynamic culture with the ultimate objective to reconstruct miniature tumoral and healthy liver tissues. These in vitro microphysiological platforms can be used for high-throughput screenings for drug safety and effectiveness, reducing the need for often unreliable animal studies.