Precision medicine aims to deliver personalized treatments to a given patient, necessitating an elucidation of the patient’s genetic makeup and the disease microenvironment. To obtain such understanding, experimental models that recapitulate human physiology and pathophysiology are highly needed, yet largely unavailable. The central goal of my work is to engineer and apply microfluidic organs-on-chips to first recreate in vitro tissue/disease models, then to unravel the mechanisms underlying tissue homeostasis, disease progression, and treatment resistance, and finally to screen therapeutic potential of novel treatments. In this talk, I will present my recent investigations of deconstructing and reconstructing tissue/tumor (liver, leukemia, and glioblastoma) microenvironments on-chip and how these models can be utilized to study therapy resistance and screen for combinational therapeutics. Overall, my research provides a blueprint for the development and leverage of tissue-engineered humanized in vitro platforms, which may enable a novel paradigm for biomedical research in a physiologically relevant context.
Chao Ma, Ph.D. is currently a Cancer Research Institute Irvington Postdoctoral Fellow at New York University Tandon School of Engineering. He received his B.S. in biotechnology in 2013 and Ph.D. in animal biotechnology in 2017 both from Northwest A&F University. His research interests focus on the development and leverage of lab-on-a-chip and organ-on-a-chip systems for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine, disease modeling, cancer biology, and immuno-engineering.