Mustafa(Pbuh) Prize laureate addressed ‘Engineering in Precision Medicine’ at Royan Institute’s webinar
The 2019 Mustafa(Pbuh) Prize laureate gave a lecture during Royan Institute’s webinar on Tissue Engineering, held on October 4, 2020.
MSTF Media reports:
The virtual event hosted by Royan Institute featured leading figures in the area of Tissue Engineering, including Ali Khademhosseini, CEO of the Terasaki Institute for Biomedical Innovation, USA, and the 2019 Mustafa Prize laureate.
Khademhosseini delivered a lecture on personalized tissues and technology platforms based on 3D printing.
Noting that Terasaki Institute is built on the legacy of Paul Terasaki who pioneered the area of organ transplantation, Khademhoseseini said they aim to “enable personalized medicine and try to not only create innovations, but also enable their translation to real-world applications.”
He stated that their work is mainly focused on “making different types of biomaterials that are tailored to individuals’ needs.”
Moreover, they create personalized devices which are related to “technology advances on flexible electronics and biosensing that allows to take the existing medical devices and add additional capabilities to them.”
They work on personalized cells as well. “These would be stem cells or immune cells. One of the things that we do with these is to try to use the different technological platforms to enable their control, and then we apply them to specific applications,” he remarked.
Applying technologies to building tissues
Discussing the need to recreate Tissue Microarchitecture, he stated that “this microarchitecture is particularly important in trying to recreate the function of the tissue.”
“When you look at various types of tissues, what you see is that these tissues are not just cells that are packed together. There is actually a lot of architecture and organization to how different cells interact with each other,” he continued.
“We try to build these types of complexities, and as you know, one of the best ways to do it is through developing engineering approaches where you can control cell and material behavior at the same length scale as what the cells are comfortable with,” he added.
He stated that over the years, lots of effort has been put on making scaffolds using microfluidics and fiber approaches, self-assembly, or lithographic approaches “to control how cells and their surrounding microenvironment interact with each other.”
According to Khademhosseini, “bioprinting technologies have enabled us to use this new platform to be able to address the cell microenvironment complexity.”
He maintained that the fascinating aspect is that “at the end of the day, we don’t want the final structure to be printed immediately, but what we require is the cells to be organized themselves.”
What happens in most of these systems is that initially the cells and the material are printed. The material allows the cells to “migrate, remodel, proliferate so that over time it starts generating structures that start looking more and more like tissues that are there in the body,” he observed.
He further hinted at the challenges faced in this area, saying that one of them is “improving the actual materials—bioinks—that are used in this process, in order to increase cell function and enhance their survival; particularly during the printing process.”
The other issue, as Khademhosseini put it, is that “we need to improve the printers in terms of faster printing, higher resolution, and multiple bioinks.”
He pointed to some of the initial work he had done with his collaborator in Korea, which was based on a bio-inspired approach.
This approach aims to “mimic what nature does to generate these kind of complexities in these systems—biomimetic approach for generating microfibers,” he said.
Khademhosseini then elaborated on serial or parallel coding of microfibers, and coding topographical features in engineered microfibers, which includes “added complexities” compared to the former.
He also explained how they have conducted the bioprinting of 3D vascularized cardiac tissue constructs. The result was that “the cells started to reorganize and beat spontaneously,” he maintained.
“When the different spots on this tissue was tracked over time, it turned out that the beating was not only consistent, but also synchronized,” he continued.
Khademhosseini gave examples of how the technology of 3D bioprinting can be used for other applications as well.
Regarding this issue, he elaborated on bone tissue engineering application, and applying these technologies to building skin.
He also touched upon how this technology can be applied to organs on a chip—3D organ models and human-on-a-chip.
He stated that they are after “creating systems that mimic the different human tissue behavior.”
“We have been doing that for a number of different tissues like liver, heart, blood vessels, and skin,” he remarked.
Enunciating the merits of this method, he said that “it allows us to build not only healthy human tissues, but also disease models that allow us to test these for various pharmaceutical applications and personalized medicine.”
He appreciated the efforts of his group, stating that “all these can only be done by bringing people together from many different backgrounds, and that’s really important for this research’s progression.”
“We’ve always had lots of great people from all over the world join our group which has always enabled us to have new and fresh ideas,” he concluded.
Ali Khademhosseini, formerly Levi Knight Professor of Bioengineering, Chemical Engineering, and Radiology at UCLA, USA, was awarded the 2019 Mustafa Prize in the field of Life & Medical Science and Technology for his achievement in Nano and Micro Fabricated Hydrogels for Biomedical Applications.
