Welcome to the Laboratory for Living Systems Engineering!
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We are an interdisciplinary research group within the Department of Biomedical Engineering in the
Viterbi School of Engineering at the University of Southern California. We are also affiliated with the Department of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine at Keck School of Medicine. |
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.
To fabricate these platforms, we are advancing and integrating three core technologies:
1. Establishing renewable sources of differentiated human cells.
2. Engineering biomimetic cellular microenvironments.
3. Developing tools to quantify tissue structure and function.
We combine these technologies towards three primary applications:
1. Establishing fundamental insight into human tissue structure-function relationships.
2. Elucidating cellular mechanisms of human diseases.
3. Developing novel platforms for pre-clinical drug screening.
To fabricate these platforms, we are advancing and integrating three core technologies:
1. Establishing renewable sources of differentiated human cells.
2. Engineering biomimetic cellular microenvironments.
3. Developing tools to quantify tissue structure and function.
We combine these technologies towards three primary applications:
1. Establishing fundamental insight into human tissue structure-function relationships.
2. Elucidating cellular mechanisms of human diseases.
3. Developing novel platforms for pre-clinical drug screening.