McAllister Heart Institute Seminar Series: Nenad Bursac, PhD, “Engineering Excitable Tissues for Experimental Studies and Regenerative Therapy”

Speaker: Nenad Bursac, PhD, Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Duke University
Topic: Engineering Excitable Tissues for Experimental Studies and Regenerative Therapy

Presentation Preview: In this talk, I will present our recent progress on engineering of human excitable tissues using primary, stem cell-derived, and genetically engineered cell sources. I will first describe scalable methodology for engineering of functional human cardiac tissues for use in medium-throughput in vitro studies and treatment of cardiac injury. Then I will describe how building on our work with rat cells, we for the first time engineered electrically and chemically responsive, contractile human skeletal muscle tissues made of primary cells isolated from standard muscle biopsies and induced pluripotent stem cells. Finally, I will describe methods to convert human unexcitable fibroblasts into an autonomous source of electrically excitable and actively conducting cells using forced expression of prokaryotic and mammalian ion channels. Together, these results open doors to new studies of human excitable tissue function, disease, and regeneration, and provide preclinical assays for testing of novel therapeutics.