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