Cardiac tissue engineering has emerged to create living, human, cardiac tissue outside the body as a model system in the near term and as a clinical replacement for diseased or damaged cardiac muscle in the long term. My laboratory is focused on understanding the intricate interplay between the extracellular matrix and cardiac cell types in vivo to guide cardiac tissue engineering efforts in vitro. In the course of this seminar I will share our most surprising mechanistic insights and describe how they now guide 3D bioprinting approaches to generating complex cardiac tissues.
Brenda Ogle is Professor and Head of Biomedical Engineering, Professor of Pediatrics, and Director of the Stem Cell Institute at the University of Minnesota. Her research team investigates the impact of extracellular matrix proteins on stem cell behavior especially in the context of the cardiovascular system. Insights gleaned over the years established mechanistic links between integrin engagement and the activity of critical transcription factors and most recently led to the development of optimized, extracellular matrix-based bioinks for 3D printing of cardiac muscle mimics featured in Newsweek. The primary strength of her laboratory is the ability to span multiple subdisciplines within both basic science (i.e., stem cell biology, cell-cell fusion, and extracellular matrices) and engineering (cytometry, instrumentation, and 3D printing) fields. Her work received funding from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense, the American Heart Association, the Coulter Foundation, Regenerative Medicine Minnesota, and MnDRIVE. She has partnered on research projects with Becton Dickinson, iCyt and Medtronic. Professor Ogle is an elected fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and served as a member of the Board of Directors of the Biomedical Engineering Society. She has served as co-chair of the Women’s Faculty Cabinet, UMN and is recipient of the Mullen-Spector-Truax Women’s Leadership Award.