This grant provides funding to partially support about 10 undergraduate students, graduate students, postdocs, or under-represented, female, and junior faculty to attend and present at the symposium on “Biofabrication for Emulating Biological Tissues†at the Fall Materials Research Society National Meeting in Boston, Massachusetts, November 29 to December 4, 2020. The 2020 program is being expanded into a 4-day symposium that will be composed of 17-20 invited talks and approximately 60 contributed talks. One additional poster session will be held on Tuesday evening (December 2, 2020) and this will offer opportunities for investigators to present their research and engage with others on an individual and informal basis. This symposium aims to bring together interdisciplinary expertise spanning from materials science, physics, chemistry, engineering, biological sciences, and medicine from the academic, industrial, and government agency communities, who focus on the developments of advanced manufacturing technologies for the generation of human based tissue models for emulating their native counterparts. In addition, this symposium will provide a platform for communications of scientists and engineers working in the area and promote cross-fertilization of ideas and technologies encompassing these different disciplines. Most importantly, the symposium will facilitate opportunities for junior faculties, postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, and researchers from underrepresented groups to present research results in an interdisciplinary and dynamic international symposium. The organizing committee is strongly committed to recruiting and promoting women and minority students, postdocs, and faculty to attend the meeting.
It is increasingly recognized that conventional and oversimplified cell culture strategies based on the planar, static formats cannot reproduce the function and complexity of biological tissues. Miniaturized biomimetic 3D tissue models fabricated using advanced materials and biomaterials, when interconnected together in a microfluidic circuit, can faithfully recapitulate the structure, biology, physiology, compartmentalization, and interconnectivity of human tissue and organ systems. These systems potentially enable accurate prediction of human responses towards pharmaceutical compounds, and facilitate high-content testing of nanomedicines, chemicals, and biological species. In the past decade, advances in materials science and microfluidics technologies have improved the capacity in the development of tissue models as simple and reproducible platforms that recapitulate tissue-level functions through incorporation of biological materials such as cells, their associated matrices, and microenvironmental cues. The utilization of fluids in micro-sized channels is cost-effective due to reductions in the quantity of cells, animals, and reagents required, making it further scalable. In a related way, rapid advancement in biofabrication technologies have enabled the creation of biomimetic microenvironments to emulate architectural fidelity, apply shear stress, strain, and/or interfaces on different biological materials. The advances in materials will continue to drive the field of in vitro tissue modeling by contributing to improved cell-instructive extracellular matrix cues, while biofabrication will enable improved 3D spatial control and dynamics required for the successful creation of the complex human tissue microenvironments. The symposium partially supported by this grant will cover interdisciplinary topics spanning from materials science, physics, chemistry, engineering, biological sciences, and medicine with an emphasis on advanced manufacturing technologies for generating microphysiological systems or organ-on-chip platforms, towards applications in both fundamental studies and translational research.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
