Tissue-Microenvironment Engineering for Regenerative Medicine

Jung Seung Lee, Ph.D.

April 29(Thu) - April 29(Thu), 2021

12PM

ZOOM (ID: 728-142-6028)

Neuro@noon Seminar

Date:  12PM, Thursday, Apr 29th

Title: Tissue-Microenvironment Engineering for Regenerative Medicine

 

Abstract: 

As the aged population is keep increasing, the concern about the healthcare and the quality of life is huge. Despite the rapid development of medicine and biotechnologies, there still are tremendous limitations in the ultimate cure of damaged tissues and their functional restoration. Tissue-mimicking biomaterials has been highlighted as key mediators for improving regeneration efficacy by providing favorable microenvironment to cells participating directly or indirectly in the regeneration. However, it is extremely hard to recapitulate tissue-specific structural and biochemical microenvironment by using conventional synthetic polymer-based approaches due to complexity of tissues in our body. Here, we report a naturally-derived tissue-mimicking biomaterial platform via decellularization technique. As the decellularized matrix does not contain cellular components triggering immune rejection, while containing native bio-functional molecules of tissues, we demonstrated biocompatible and tissue-specific biomaterials for versatile applications in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. Not only using the decellularized matrix for tissue replacement, the tissue-specific extracellular matrices were further engineered for the development of functional cell culture platform, tissue modeling platform, and improving efficacy of stem cell therapies. Overall, our tissue-microenvironment engineering strategies enable development of tissue-specific biomaterial platform for effective and practical treatment of damaged tissues.