Research Projects

The challenge in tissue engineering is to create and maintain large tissues with an optimal supply of oxygen, as the competition between oxygen diffusion and cell consumption creates hypoxic regions deep inside the tissue. Traditional 3D cell culture and bioprinting methods only address the metabolic behavior of single cells and structuring of cells in 3D, failing to address prolonged oxygen supply. This limits the long-term culture of large 3D tissues and the future prospects of tissue engineering. Oxygen-supplying vasculatures in 3D cell culture hold the key to successfully preparing breathable tissues for real applications. Recent explorations have addressed transport in tissues by studying entangled vascular networks inside monolithic hydrogel, but a working principle for creating implantable vascularized tissues remains unachieved. Designing mechanically stable tissues is crucial, as tissues constantly experience various mechanical stimuli. Previous works have focused on questioning the mechanical properties of 2D monolayers of cells and bulk tissues, but investigating the mechanical properties of soft tissues remains challenging. This constraint restricts our ability to regulate the mechanical properties of artificial tissues without the addition of synthetic stabilizers. The proposed work addresses these challenges by delivering a noninvasive technique to measure the mechanical properties of soft artificial tissues and using mechanical and chemical actuation to cause trans-differentiation in bioprinted structures of stem cells.