LIVING SYSTEMS ENGINEERING

To develop safe and effective cures for human diseases, we need reliable models of human tissues to establish the underlying biology and screen drugs. However, existing model systems, such as rodents and conventional cell culture approaches, fall short in recapitulating critical features of native human tissues and providing easily-accessible functional outputs. To address this need, we engineer micro-scale mimics of native healthy and diseased human tissues that provide meaningful physiological outputs and are scalable for downstream applications, such as drug screening. We focus primarily on cardiac and skeletal muscle.

Primary location: Los Angeles United States