Tissue Engineered Disease Models
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Aging
Aging remains a fundamental open problem in modern biology. We investigate how microscopic failures cascade to macroscopic failures of tissues, organs, and ultimately the organism.
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Engineered Myocardium as Disease Models
Studying heart tissue is critical for understanding and developing treatments for cardiovascular diseases. We fabricate precisely controlled and biomimetic engineered model tissues to study how cell-cell and cell-matrix interactions influence myocardial cell survival under heart attack conditions.
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Heart-on-a-Chip using Human Stem Cells
Human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) have recently emerged as a way to study human biology. In the Zorlutuna Lab, we use tissue engineering to develop and characterize 3D hearts-on-a-chip to study human cardiovascular disease in vitro.
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Modeling Metastasis and the Tumor Microenvironment
The combination of advanced 3D cell culture models and perfusion provides a powerful in vitro approach to modeling complex processes in disease. We are using this approach to investigate how migrating cancer cells interact with their surrounding environment.
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Stem Cell-derived Cardiomyocytes for Bioengineering Applications
Studying heart disease using human-origin platforms is essential to increase the success rate in clinical trials. We optimize the differentiation process of hiPSC-derived cardiomyocytes to obtain a reproducible source for such human-origin engineered platforms.