Home Department: Human Biology
Mentor: Marlene Rabinovitch (Pediatrics - Cardiology)

“Developing a 3-Dimensional Reductionist Pulmonary Arteriole Model to Study Cell-Cell Interactions under Healthy and Pathologic Blood Flow”

A model for pulmonary arterioles is being developed using 3D-bioprinted fibrin tubes, endothelial cells (EC), and smooth muscle cells (SMC). The EC-SMC co-culture system will then be exposed to laminar shear stress (LSS, from normal blood flow) and high shear stress (HSS, from pathologic blood flow as seen in idiopathic pulmonary hypertension and Williams syndrome). Confocal microscopy and RNA sequencing will then be used to examine EC-SMC interactions and SMC proliferation under LSS and HSS. Eventually, a variation of this model using patients’ stem-cell-derived ECs and SMCs may be used in high-throughput drug screening for potential therapeutics for pulmonary hypertension.