Molecular, Cell and Tissue Engineering
Analysis of the LacNAc level on a lung adenocarcinoma microarray. Source: Prof. Sara Rouhanifard
Principles for engineering living cells and tissues are essential to address many of the most significant biomedical challenges facing our society today. These application areas include engineering biomaterials to coax and enable stem cells to form functional tissue or to heal damaged tissue; designing vehicles for delivering genes and therapeutics to reach specific target cells to treat a disease; and uncovering therapeutic strategies to curb pathological cell behaviors and tissue phenotypes.
At a more fundamental level, the field is at the nascent stages of understanding how cells make decisions in complex microenvironments and how cells interact with each other and their surrounding environment to organize into complex three-dimensional tissues. Advances will require multiscale experimental, computational, and theoretical approaches spanning molecular-cellular-tissue levels and integration of molecular and physical mechanisms, including the role of mechanical forces.
Primary faculty contacts
a.asthagiri@northeastern.edu
cell and tissue engineering, quantitative principles of cancer cell biology and developmental biology
a.bajpayee@northeastern.edu
Drug delivery; bio-electrostatics; transport phenomena in biological systems; biomechanics; osteoarthritis
s.chung@northeastern.edu
Brain cell regeneration, automated microscopy and laser surgery, user-friendly and low-cost fluorescence microscopy
g.dai@northeastern.edu
3-D bioprinting technology, stem cells technology and vascular bioengineering
m.jaeggli@northeastern.edu
Synthetic biology, microbiology, biosensor development
l.makowski@northeastern.edu
Image and signal processing as applied to biophysical data designed to answer fundamental questions about the molecular basis of living systems, and progression of Alzheimer's Disease
h.parameswaran@northeastern.edu
We study cell-cell and cell-extracellular matrix interactions in the airway to understand the fundamental mechanisms that regulate airway caliber and why they fail in diseases like asthma.
s.rouhanifard@northeastern.edu
Developing chemical approaches to track and quantify important RNA processing events and modifications in single cells; DNA: protein interactions that drive differences in gene expression; understanding differences in RNA expression and the impacts on disease and development
j.ruberti@northeastern.edu
Tissue engineering of load-bearing matrix (bone, cornea); bioreactor design; multi-scale mechanobiochemistry; statistical mechanics; energetics microscopy; high-resolution imaging; biopolymer self-assembly
s.shi@northeastern.edu
Cancer detection and drug discovery technologies