MSE Colloquium: Nenad Bursac, Cardiac Patch from Scratch

Abstract

Despite numerous studies, the process of cardiac tissue development from the early embryonic to adult age remains incompletely understood, primarily due to our inability to successfully recapitulate different stages of cardiomyogenesis in vitro. The use of tissue engineering techniques offers a possibility to generate and manipulate 3-dimensional cell culture environments to both improve our understanding of the important cardiomyogenic processes and promote the development of new cell, gene, and drug therapies for cardiac disease. Over the last decade, our efforts have been focused on the use of natural hydrogels and primary cardiomyocytes or cardiogenic stem cells to generate engineered cardiac tissue patches with advanced structural organization, functional output, and maturation state. We find that hydrogel composition, boundary conditions imposed on cells, and different supporting non-myogenic cells uniquely contribute to structural  and electromechanical properties of the engineered myocardium. In this presentation, I will describe our recent cardiac tissue engineering studies that utilize primary neonatal rat cardiomyocytes as well as mouse and human embryonic stem cells. Under optimized culture conditions, engineered tissue patches made of these cells can attain structural and functional properties that resemble those found in age-matched tissues in vivo and even approach those of adult myocardium. The long-term goal of this research is to promote the development of successful tissue engineering therapies for human heart disease.

Bio

Dr. Nenad Bursac obtained his undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering at Belgrade University, Serbia, and his PhD degree in Biomedical Engineering at Boston University. During his PhD work in the group of Dr. Robert Langer at MIT, Dr. Bursac published the first cardiac tissue engineering manuscript in the US in 1999. His postdoctoral research with Dr. Leslie Tung at JHU involved the development of novel methodologies to control architecture and function of 2- and 3-dimensional cardiac tissue equivalents for use in electrophysiological studies and cell-based cardiac therapies. He joined Duke Biomedical Engineering as Assistant Professor in October of 2003, and since July of 2010, he has been appointed as an Associate Professor with tenure.

Currently, Dr. Bursac's research is aimed at use of cell, tissue, and genetic engineering techniques and electrophysiological and biomechanical studies to advance fields of somatic and stem cell based therapies for cardiac and skeletal muscle disease. Some examples of this work include: 1) combining DT-MRI and cell micropatternining techniques to create novel 2- and 3-dimensional cardiac cell cultures that replicate micro- and macrostructure of native myocardium, 2) development of specialized co-culture assays to study structural and functional interactions between cardiomyocytes and nonmyocytes, 3) a novel mesoscopic hydrogel molding technique for fabrication of large, aligned, and highly functional skeletal and cardiac muscle tissues derived from stem cells, and 4) generation of novel biosynthetic excitable cells and tissues for basic studies of ion channel function and use in somatic cell therapies for excitable tissue disease.