Could tissue engineering mean personalized medicine Nina Tandon

I’d like to show you a video of some of

the models I work with they’re all the

perfect size and they don’t have an

ounce of fat did I mention they’re

gorgeous and their scientific models as

you might have guessed I’m a tissue

engineer and this is a video of some of

the beating heart that I’ve engineered

in the lab and one day we hope that

these tissues can serve as replacement

parts for the human body but what I’m

going to tell you about today is how

these tissues make awesome models well

let’s think about the drug screening

process for a moment you go from drug

formulation lab testing animal testing

and then clinical trials which you might

call human testing before the drugs get

to mark it costs a lot of money a lot of

time and sometimes even when a drug hits

the market it acts in an unpredictable

way and actually hurts people and later

it fails the worse the consequences it

all boils down to two issues one humans

are not wrapped and two despite our

incredible similarities to one another

actually those tiny differences between

you and I have huge impacts with how we

metabolize drugs and how those drugs

affect us so what if we had better

models in the lab that could not only

mimic us better than rats but also

reflect our diversity let’s see how we

can do it with tissue engineering one of

the key technologies that’s really

important is what’s called induced

pluripotent stem cells they were

developed in Japan pretty recently okay

induced pluripotent stem cells they’re a

lot like embryonic stem cells except

without the controversy we induced cells

okay say skin cells by adding a few

genes to them culturing them and then

harvesting them so there’s skin cells

that can be tricked kind of like

cellular amnesia into an embryonic state

so without the controversy that’s cool

thing number one cool thing number two

you can grow any type of tissue out of

them brain heart liver you get the

picture but out of yourself so we can

make a model of your heart your brain on

a chip

generating tissues of predictable

density and behaviors the second piece

and will be really key towards getting

these models to be adopted for drug

discovery and this is a schematic of a

bioreactor we’re developing in our lab

to help engineer tissues in a more

modular scalable way going forward

imagine a massively parallel version of

this with thousands of pieces of human

tissue it would be like having a

clinical trial on a chip but another

thing about these induced pluripotent

stem cells is that if we take some skin

cells let’s say from people with a

genetic disease and we engineer tissues

out of them we can actually use tissue

engineering techniques to generate

models of those diseases in the lab

here’s an example from kevin egan slab

at harvard he generated neurons from

these induced pluripotent stem cells

from patients who have Lou Gehrig’s

disease and he differentiated them into

neurons and what’s amazing is that these

neurons also show symptoms of the

disease so with disease models like

these we can fight back faster than ever

before and understand the disease better

than ever before and maybe discover

drugs even faster this is another

example of patient-specific stem cells

that were engineered from someone with

retinitis pigmentosa this is a

degeneration of the retina it’s a

disease that runs in my family and we

really hope that sells like these will

help us find a cure so some people think

that these models sound well and good

but asked will are these really as good

as the rat the rat is an entire organism

after all with interacting networks of

organs a drug for the heart can get

metabolized in the liver and some of the

byproducts may be stored in the fat

don’t you miss all that with these

tissue engineered models well this is

another trend in the field by combining

tissue engineering techniques with micro

fluidics the field is actually evolving

towards just that a model of the entire

ecosystem of the body complete with

multiple organ systems to be able to

test how a drug you might take for your

blood pressure might affect your liver

or an antidepressant might affect your

heart these systems are really hard to

build but we’re just starting to be able

to get there and so watch out

but that’s not even all of it because

once a drug is approved tissue

engineering techniques can actually help

us develop more personalized treatments

this is an example that you might care

about someday and I hope you never do

because imagine if you ever get that

call that gives you that bad news that

you might have cancer wouldn’t you

rather test to see if those cancer drugs

you’re going to take are going to work

on your cancer this is an example from

Karen Berg slab where they’re using

inkjet technologies to print breast

cancer cells and study its progressions

and treatments and some of our

colleagues at Tufts are mixing models

like these with tissue engineered bone

to see House cancer might spread from

one part of the body to the next and you

can imagine those kinds of multi tissue

chips to be the next generation of these

kinds of studies and so thinking about

the models that we’ve just discussed you

can see going forward that tissue

engineering is actually poised to help

revolutionize drug screening at every

single step of the path disease models

making for better drug formulations

massively parallel human tissue models

helping to revolutionize lab testing

reduce animal testing and human testing

and clinical trials an individualized

therapies that disrupts what we even

consider to be a market at all

essentially we’re dramatically speeding

up that feedback between developing a

molecule and learning about how it acts

in the human body our process for doing

this isn’t centrally transforming

biotechnology and pharmacology into an

information technology helping us

discover and evaluate drugs faster more

cheaply and more effectively gives new

meaning to models against animal testing

doesn’t it thank you

you