Graduating seniors Kelly Rhodes and Casey Vantucci were both recently awarded graduate research fellowships from the National Science Foundation. This will provide both with three years of support as they pursue their graduate studies. Congratulations to both!
A full list of award offers can be found here.
PhD student Tony Melchiorri and MS student Owen Ball successfully defended their theses. Tony’s thesis was “Engineering biodegradable vascular scaffolds for congenital heart disease,” while Owen’s was “Effects of 3D Printed Vascular Networks on Human Mesenchymal Stem Cell Viability in Large Tissue Constructs.” Congratulations to both!
Professor John P. Fisher has been selected as the next chair of the A. James Clark School of Engineering’s Fischell Department of Bioengineering (BioE), effective Jan. 4, 2016.
“Dr. Fisher’s rapid ascension in academic rank parallels his many outstanding achievements in both teaching and research,” said Darryll Pines, Farvardin Professor and Dean of the A. James Clark School of Engineering. “As a leader in the areas of biomaterials, tissue engineering, and bioprinting, Dr. Fisher has demonstrated firsthand bioengineering’s capacity to improve quality of life for millions. I am confident he will advance the Fischell Department of Bioengineering’s reputation as a top-tier program by further propelling the department’s commitment to groundbreaking research, high-quality education, and engineering entrepreneurship.”
With the University of Maryland’s A. James Clark Hall (link is external) slated to open in 2017, Fisher will assume the role of Chair as the department enters a new era of growth in both size and breadth of research. The 184,000-square-foot building will become the new home of the Fischell Department of Bioengineering and will house state-of-the-art technology to advance the department’s capabilities in areas including digital fabrication, tissue engineering, bioinformatics, optics, vaccine research, and biomedical device development. Coinciding with this expansion, the department plans to add up to seven new faculty members by 2019.
Prior to his appointment as Chair, Fisher served as Associate Chair and Director of Graduate Studies for the department and, in 2013, he was named the Fischell Family Distinguished Professor. From 2009 to 2012, Fisher served as BioE Associate Chair and Director of Undergraduate Studies.
Fisher is a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, and a member of the Biomedical Engineering Society, Society for Biomaterials, and Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine International Society. He is currently Editor-in-Chief of the journal Tissue Engineering, Part B: Reviews, and Continental Chair Elect of the Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine International Society – Americas Chapter. This fall, he visited the National University of Ireland, Galway as a Fulbright Fellow.
As Principal Investigator for the Tissue Engineering and Biomaterials Laboratory, Fisher established a mission to develop engineered tissues, composed of biomaterials and transplanted cell populations, for the treatment of traumatic or pathological tissue defects. His laboratory has published more than 110 articles, book chapters, and proceedings, and has delivered more than 200 invited and contributed presentations, while utilizing over $7 million of financial support from the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, Food and Drug Administration, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Department of Defense, and other institutions.
Over the years, the laboratory’s research successes have earned publication in a number of leading journals including Biomaterials, Biomacromolecules, Nature Protocols, and Tissue Engineering. Members of Fisher’s lab have presented studies to the Biomedical Engineering Society, Society for Biomaterials, Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine International Society, World Biomaterials Conference, and International Conference on Tissue Engineering.
Fisher first started with the University of Maryland as an assistant professor with the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering before moving to help establish the Fischell Department of Bioengineering in 2006.
Fisher holds a Ph.D. in Bioengineering from Rice University, as well as a B.S. and an M.S. in Chemical Engineering from Johns Hopkins University and the University of Cincinnati, respectively. Upon completing his Ph.D., Fisher served as a postdoctoral fellow with the University of California Davis Medical Center Department of Orthopaedic Surgery.
Fisher will serve as successor to current chair William E. Bentley, who will be the inaugural director of the new Robert E. Fischell Institute for Biomedical Devices.
Article originally from: Fischell Department of Bioengineering.
Fischell Department of Bioengineering (BioE) Professor and Associate Chair John Fisher was named the recipient of a Fulbright Scholar fellowship this summer. Fisher will apply his fellowship to work towards developing a new class of biomaterials for regenerative medicine applications at the National University of Ireland, Galway (NUIG) through the end of the calendar year.
Fisher hopes that his work with NUIG will lead to the development of a novel, natural-synthetic hybrid material that can act as a lasting replacement for malfunctioning or diseased tissue in the cardiovascular system.
Each year, clinicians perform procedures to implant more than 175,000 prosthetic valves and 600,000 vascular grafts to replace damaged native structures.
For such procedures, biological tissues offer clear advantages over synthetic substitutes as materials for prosthetic applications. In addition to their inherent bioactivity, biological tissues possess “intelligent” elastic and mechanical properties that cannot be replicated by manmade material.
One such material historically used for cardiovascular repair is pericardial tissue – tissue derived from a thin, elastic membrane that surrounds the heart. Pericardial tissue is ideal for prosthetic applications because of its availability, inherent strength, and elastic properties; but, as is the case with transplanting any natural tissue into new environments, there are challenges.
Transplanting natural tissue can result in an inflammatory immune response from the host, as well as chemical and biological degradation. To combat such challenges, bioengineers often preserve pericardial tissue in glutaraldehyde (GA), which chemically crosslinks the collagen and elastin molecules that compose the tissue. But, while this process is effective at stabilizing the tissue against chemical and enzymatic degradation, it often results in detrimental calcification of the implant.
As such, Fisher and fellow bioengineers are developing a way to apply a paintable, biodegradable polymer – poly(propylene fumarate) – to the surface of pericardium tissue. Their hypothesis is that the polymer will provide physical support without eliciting a significant immune response.
Fisher believes that the research his team conducts at NUIG will benefit both the laboratories in Galway and at the University of Maryland. While Fisher’s UMD Tissue Engineering and Biomaterials Laboratory has developed considerable expertise in areas including synthetic polymer synthesis, biomaterials fabrication, and 3-D printing, NUIG’s specialties include tissue engineering scaffold fabrication, atomic force microscopy, and dynamic mechanical analysis. As such, Fisher believes his Fulbright Scholar fellowship project will help establish a foundation for the future exchange of both student researchers and scientific ideas between the laboratories at Galway and Maryland.
Article originally from: Fischell Department of Bioengineering.
Fischell Department of Bioengineering (BioE) Associate Professor Yu Chen was recently awarded a four-year, $1.29 million National Institutes of Health (NIH) Research Project Grant (R01) for developing a new system capable of non-invasive, three-dimensional imaging of engineered tissue.
Collaborators on this project include Dr. John Caccamese, Jr. (Associate Professor of Oral-Maxillofacial Surgery at the University of Maryland Medical System and University of Maryland Baltimore College of Dental Surgery) and our lab.
Bone tissue engineering scaffolds are used in a wide variety of clinical settings to promote bone repair and regeneration. As such, these scaffolds act as vehicles for the delivery of progenitor cell populations or support structures for surrounding tissue ingrowth. Often, the properties of the scaffold – such as composition, porosity, pore size, and pore interconnectivity – play a determining role in the success of the engineered tissue. To improve tissue regeneration and integration, for instance, engineers must design scaffolds that mimic surrounding tissue morphology, structure, and function, and improve mechanical stability between the implanted engineered tissue and the surrounding native bone.
“Three-dimensional cell-based tissue grafts have been increasingly useful in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine,” Chen said. “A critical building block in tissue engineering is the scaffold, which can act as the supporting medium to deliver cell populations and induce ingrowth of vessels and surrounding tissues. Therefore, it is necessary to develop tools to characterize the architecture of the scaffold.”
Currently, however, there are no non-destructive methods of analyzing engineered tissue structures and stem cell functions beyond the reach of traditional microscopy. This means, researchers have had limited ability to characterize cells located deep inside scaffolds.
In fact, today’s most frequently used tissue scaffold characterization techniques present a number of disadvantages including complex preparation procedures and risks of damaging the tissue scaffold. Most techniques are invasive, discrete methods of analysis, while some are expensive and involve a long data acquisition process.
To combat these challenges, Chen and his fellow researchers are developing a new platform that utilizes optical coherence tomography (OCT) and fluorescence laminar optical tomography (FLOT) for characterization of cell-scaffold interaction. OCT is a non-invasive imaging technique that uses light to capture micrometer-resolution, three-dimensional images of biological tissue, while FLOT is a high-resolution imaging technique that uses fluorescent light to produce images of tissue.
Generally, engineered tissue exists as a combination of living cells and the supporting scaffold. OCT is able to visualize the internal structure of the scaffold in 3D, enabling subsequent image processing to quantitatively investigate characteristics such as pore size, porosity, and inter-connectivity. Meanwhile, FLOT is able to visualize cell viability, proliferation, distribution, and differentiation within the scaffold over time and space.
As such, the combined OCT/FLOT system offers promise that researchers will be able to evaluate both structural and cellular information simultaneously to study cell-scaffold interaction and collect feedback on the design of scaffolds in order to achieve optimal cellular function. This means that the system proposed by Chen’s research team could have a tremendous impact on how engineers construct and evaluate tissue scaffolds, and could pave the way for major advancements in bone tissue engineering.
The team’s efforts demonstrate how multi-disciplinary collaboration can produce revolutionary advancements in engineering. As an Mpowering the State research initiative, Chen and Fisher of the University of Maryland in College Park, Md., are able to work across campuses with University of Maryland Medical System/Baltimore College of Dental Surgery’s Caccamese, who contributes clinical expertise to the project.
More information about the Mpowering the State initiative is available online.
Article originally from: Fischell Department of Bioengineering.