This is a past event.

Biomedical Engineering Seminar

Yifan Yuan, PhD

American Heart Association Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of Anesthesiology
Yale University

Abstract

Diseases of the lung vasculature, including primary pulmonary hypertension, capillary leak syndrome/acute respiratory distress syndrome, inhalation injury, and the novel coronavirus disease-19 (COVID19), are difficult to study in vitro due to the lack of functional ex vivo models. Typical culture systems do not recapitulate lung macro- and micro-vascular structure, and the phenotype of cultured endothelium differs dramatically from that of native. Whole organ decellularization opens a door to developing a construct that can recapitulate a complete vascular structure. In this seminar, I will present a novel pulmonary vascular platform from endothelial repopulated whole lung scaffolds. First, I will describe protocol development, bioreactor assembly, and cellular characterization using single-cell RNA-sequencing analysis, in our endothelial repopulated lung scaffolds. Second, I will describe methods to enhance endothelial cell functions in our whole lung modeling system. In the final part, I will briefly discuss my future strategies in rationally designing a native-mimicking vascular platform for disease modeling.