Title: 

3D Bioprinting Advanced Stem-cell Based Soft Tissue Constructs: The Future of Personalized Medicine

 Abstract:

Traditionally, clinical treatment has relied on the field of conventional medicine, where treatment is trial and error based within a wide cohort of patients. While this approach is the predominant form of care practiced today, it oftentimes is inefficient, especially regarding drug development, and fails to account for disease heterogeneity or genetic variation observed between patients. Increasingly efforts are turning towards an emerging field, personalized medicine, where treatment is informed by a patient’s specific physiological and molecular characteristics, rather than a consensus. Personalized medicine has the potential to revolutionize not only patient treatment, but our understanding of disease through modeling and drug discovery. Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) are at the forefront of personalized medicine due to their direct derivation from a patient’s cells, ability to differentiate into almost any cell type, and self-renewal capabilities. While iPSCs are an impressive clinical development, they still are only half of the story, as they require a micro physiological environment that can support their growth and functionality. To create this construct, bioprinting, an additive manufacturing technique, is used to spatially orient cells and bioink in a synergistic fashion that mimics the structure of a native tissue.

To capture the complexity of native tissue required for full cell and system functionality, iPSCs will be utilized alongside bioprinting to create 3D constructs that mimic the micro physiological environment. This work will first start by developing a bioprinting protocol that ensures the viability and functionality of iPSCs and its derived cell types, with a specific focus on pancreatic islets and the thymus. Upon developing the relevant parametric conditions necessary for the bioprinting of iPSCs, the focus will shift to scaling bioprinting technology to increase manufacturing of iPSC organoids, to move towards meeting the growing clinical cell demand. Finally, we will build upon these bioprinting studies by formulating a multi-layer and multi-material iPSC organoid scaffold that more accurately models a native thymus tissue. This advanced structure will be designed to act as a perfusable construct that enables the cellular processes required for the formation of T cells within the thymus.

Chair:

Dr. Ipsita Banerjee

Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering, University of Pittsburgh

Co-Chair:

Dr. Prashant Kumta

Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering, University of Pittsburgh

Committee Members:

 Dr. Lei Li

Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering, University of Pittsburgh

 Dr. Yong Fan

Allegheny Health Network Institute of Cellular Therapeutics