Date/Time
Date(s) - 11/28/2022
3:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Location
Communicore, C1-009
Organs on Chips are being designed as accurate models of healthy and diseased human organs. These collaborative ventures seek to replace the current paradigm of high quantity, low quality data with limited applicability to the human patient with mid-quantity, high quality data that will eventually be patient specific. However, multiple daunting, yet scientifically fertile roadblocks will need to be addressed along the way: identifying a robust source of primary or stem cell derived human tissues; recapitulation of organ-specific microenvironments and architectures; development of a universal culture media for multiple cell/tissue types; agile deployment of multiple chips through a network of pumps, valves, switches, collection ports, and sampling ports; integration of on-chip sensors and analytics for real-time evaluation of function; extrapolation of in-vitro results to in vivo outcomes; allometric scaling laws of organ chips with respect to each other; and finally, translating these devices in a scalable manner into the laboratories of basic scientists and pharmaceutical companies. This seminar will cover our contributions in each of these thrust areas.
Bio: Ashu Agarwal is an Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Miami and directs the Cancer Engineering and Urologic Engineering Institutes at University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. His undergraduate degree from Indian Institute of Technology, and his PhD from University of Florida (GO GATORS) are both in Materials Science and Engineering. He then gathered postdoctoral research experience in Biomedical Engineering at Columbia University, and at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University. The mission of his Physiomimetic Microsystems Laboratory at the University of Miami is to develop human relevant organ mimic platforms for discovery of therapies and drugs, for modeling of disease states, for conducting mechanistic studies, and for differentiation, maturation and evaluation of stem cells. The lab is supported by multiple NIH consortium grants, Early stage commercialization grants from Wallace H. Coulter Foundation, and a Sponsored research project from Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals.