Speaker: Young Hye Song, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Associate
Department of Biomedical Engineering
University of Florida
Title: Engineering Tissue Mimics for Disease Modeling and Regenerative Medicine
Abstract:
Interactions between cells and extracellular matrices (ECM) are one of the most critical drivers behind health and disease, as evidenced by ECM alterations that contribute to various types of pathogeneses such as cancer, spinal cord injury, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. This increased appreciation of cell-ECM interactions calls for three-dimensional (3-D) cell culture systems that can facilitate a better mechanistic understanding of tissue microenvironment-mediated disease progression. However, most tissue engineering approaches still do not incorporate the complete tissue-specific ECM profile and therefore do not fully recapitulate the native tissue microenvironment. This lack of physiologically relevant culture models accounts for the limited clinical translatability of successful pre-clinical studies. This talk will initially showcase a simple 3-D platform to understand direct and indirect tumor-stroma interactions in promoting the rise of tumor-associated stromal cells and subsequent angiogenesis. Then, I will introduce tissue decellularization approaches to create tissue-specific 3-D scaffolds. Specifically, my talk will explore novel decellularization methods where the heavy use of detergents can be avoided to prevent necrotic death of tissue-resident cells and subsequent harsh washing steps needed to remove intracellular debris. Ultimately, a combination of acellular tissue-derived 3-D culture platforms and tissue-resident cells can be used to develop translatable therapeutic scaffolds and engineer physiologically relevant test beds.
Bio:
Young Hye Song is currently a postdoctoral associate in Biomedical Engineering at the University of Florida (Advisor: Prof. Christine Schmidt). She received her B.S. in Chemical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, and Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from Cornell University (Advisor: Prof. Claudia Fischbach-Teschl). Dr. Song’s doctoral research focused on assessing the effects of different mammary tumor microenvironmental factors on pro-angiogenic behavior of adipose-derived stem cells and subsequent sprouting angiogenesis. She is currently developing novel tissue decellularization methods and injectable acellular tissue scaffolds for disease modeling and cell transplantation therapies. Her work has been funded by the NIH and NSF, and she has won Swanson Graduate Fellowship in Biomedical Engineering, Mogam Science Foundation Fellowship and UF BME Postdoc Excellence Award.
