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Biomedical Engineering Seminar

Yi Hong
Assistant Professor, Bioengineering Department 
University of Texas at Arlington

Abstract: Cardiovascular disease is the top 1 killer in the worldwide. Biomaterial based tissue repair/regeneration approaches have been widely utilized to manage heart infarction and vascular diseases. Due to softness and elasticity of heart muscle and blood vessels, biodegradable elastic materials have gained interests as cardiac patches or vascular grafts. Biodegradable polyurethane, a typical elastic polymer, has been pro-cessed into porous scaffolds as heart patches to treat heart infarction, and also tubular scaffolds as vascular grafts to replace blood vessels. Polyurethane based cardiac patches increased infarcted rat/pig heart thickness and reduced infarction area with heart function improvement. The acellular or cellularized vascular grafts were implanted to replace rat abdominal aorta, and exhibited enhanced patency with good tissue remodeling. Based on those cardiovascular applications, polyurethanes were further designed to be functional having con-trolled degradation, tunable mechanical properties, and other biofunctions. These newly developed polyure-thanes also have opportunities to be applied for cardiovascular engineering. 

Bio: Dr. Yi Hong is an Assistant Professor in the Bioengineering Department at the University of Texas at Arlington. He achieved his PhD in Material Science and Engineering in 2005 at Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China. And then Dr. Hong worked as a postdoc and later as a Research Assistant Professor in the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine in the University of Pittsburgh from 2006 to 2012. After joined in UTA in 2012, his research focuses on developing functional and bioactive biodegradable soft materials and transla-tional research for tissue repair and regeneration, drug delivery and bio-imaging applications with emphasis on cardiovascular disease treatment. He has published over 60 peer-review papers in the field of biomaterials, and 10 patents as well as over 100 conference abstracts. He received NSF CAREER award in 2016, and was elected as a Fellow of American Heart Association in 2017. His research has been funded from AHA, NSF, NIH, ONR and CPRIT.