Engineering Native Biological Complexity from the Inside–out and Outside–in
Abstract:
Engineering heterogenous multicellular tissue with native complexity remains one of the holy grails of regenerative medicine and basic biological research. As success in this regard would yield powerful bioengineered constructs useful in functional transplantation, high-throughput drug screening, and fundamental biology investigation, research efforts in our lab have centered around developing and implementing tools to spatiotemporally customize living cell function both from the “outside–in” and from the “inside–out”. In this talk, I will discuss some of our group’s recent successes in reversibly modifying the chemical and physical aspects of synthetic cell culture platforms with user-defined and grayscale control, regulating cell-biomaterial interactions through user-programmable Boolean logic, engineering microvascular networks that span nearly all size scales of native human vasculature (including capillaries), irreversibly photoassembling bioactive proteins within living cells, and driving biomolecular condensate formation using de novo-designed proteins. Results will highlight our ability to modulate intricate cellular behavior including stem cell differentiation, protein secretion, and cell-cell interactions in 4D.