Posted October 6, 2014
Leo Wan, an assistant professor in the biomedical engineering department, has been selected to receive the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award. This award is the most prestigious award that a researcher can receive at this stage in their career Leo is the first researcher at RPI to win this award.
The NIH Director’s New Innovator (DP2) Award initiative supports a small number of early stage investigators of exceptional creativity who propose bold and highly innovative new research approaches that have the potential to produce a major impact on broad, important problems in biomedical and behavioral research. The New Innovator Award initiative complements ongoing efforts by NIH and its Institutes and Centers to fund early stage investigators through R01 grants, which continue to be the major sources of NIH support for early stage investigators.
Specifically, the proposal for which the award was given deals with the following topic: Chirality, also known as handedness or left-right (LR) asymmetry, is a conserved feature in the development of multi-cellular organisms, and can be seen in the growth of climbing plants, the helices of snail shells, and the positioning of internal organs in the human body. For human, defects in laterality such as isomerism (loss of asymmetry), and heterotaxia (a loss of concordance among the individual organs) are observed in more than 1 in 8000 live births, and have significant clinical implications. In vertebrates, epithelial chiral morphogenesis is important in establishing the LR asymmetric body plan, from the early nodal flow at the ventral node to the later heart c-looping and gut asymmetric rotation. Traditionally, LR asymmetry is studied with animal embryos in vivo, which is often very challenging. The direct manipulation of human embryos is restricted because of the obvious ethical concerns. Recently, we have recapitulated epithelial chiral morphogenesis on micropatterned surfaces. Now we want to further develop in vitro systems for studying embryonic LR axis development. Our rationale is that novel cell chirality based high-throughput platforms and a better understanding of molecular mechanisms of epithelial cell chirality can greatly facilitate the LR asymmetry research in developmental biology. We propose to use a combination of embryonic stem cell culture, micro-fabrication, live cell imaging, molecular assay, traction force measurement, and high-throughput screening as tools to elucidate the underlying biophysical and biochemical mechanisms for epithelial chiral morphogenesis. Our objectives are to establish multiscale in vitro models for LR asymmetry in development and to identify important signaling pathways and cytoskeletal proteins that affect epithelial cell chirality.