Cardiovascular disease is an epidemic; it is the leading cause of death worldwide and is increasing in prevalence year-over-year. One reason treatments are so difficult to develop is because potential therapeutics lack a suitable lab-based screening platform. Ineffectual screening of therapeutics early on in their development results in needing long and expensive clinical trials to determine efficacy. Existing models of cardiovascular disease include 2-D cell culture systems, and 3D tissue and organoid models, but these human cell models lack sufficient maturity and microstructure. These limitations prevent lab results from being clinically translatable for heart diseases which related to mature cardiomyocytes. The proposed research project seeks to develop a heart-on-a-chip platform that can mimic the complex microenvironment of the native myocardium for creating more physiologically relevant heart-on-a-chip model.
| Prof. Yan Yan Shery Huang |
Department of Engineering |
| Jack Murphy |
Department of Engineering |
| Dr. Xuan Li |
Department of Medicine |
