Brenda Ogle
University of Minnesota, MN·Biomedical Engineering
Heart muscle cells grown from human stem cells could be used to model heart disease, test drugs and devices, and perhaps someday repair damaged hearts. A major barrier is that these lab-grown cells stay immature.
- Fields
Biomedical Engineering
Engineering
Physiology
- Topics
cardiac tissue engineering
cardiomyocytes
hPSC-CMs
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through May 2030
What they work on
- Identify growth factors secreted by epicardial progenitor cells that boost proliferation of hiPSC-derived heart muscle cells, using gene editing and high-throughput proteomics in a 3D-printed layered cardiac tissue.
- Determine which ECM proteins secreted by epicardial-derived cells drive structural and functional maturation of engineered human cardiac tissue.
- Add an epicardial layer to a 3D-printed chambered myocardial pump and measure stroke work and ejection fraction with and without imposed volumetric pressure.
- Develop and validate a computational fluid-structure interaction model that reproduces native cardiac pressure profiles in the epi-hChaMP chambered muscle pump.
- Test how cardiac fibroblasts remodel the ECM under physiologic loading to drive heart muscle cell maturation, and use statistical optimization to define loading regimes that maximize maturation.
More about the research
They behave more like embryonic cells than adult heart muscle, and tissues made from them are thin and weak. The lab's work explores how signals from neighboring cells and from the extracellular matrix (ECM), the protein scaffold around cells, can drive these cells to mature. It also builds a 3D-printed, chambered human heart-muscle pump to study this.
Why it matters
More mature, lab-grown human heart tissue could provide better models for studying heart disease and for testing drugs and medical devices. This is especially useful for conditions that alter pressure-volume dynamics. In the longer term, a living human muscle pump grown in a dish might be used to help restore heart function in patients with heart disease.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Forum Kamdar
University of Minnesota, MN·Biomedical Engineering·Early-career
Build 3D-bioprinted human chambered muscle pumps (hChaMPs) from DMD patient stem cell-derived heart cells and test how progressively increasing pressure alters mechanotransduction and heart function at early and later disease stages.
Ryan Stowers
University of California-Santa Barbara, CA·Biomedical Engineering
Determine whether cardiomyopathy-driven remodeling of the extracellular matrix alters myocardial viscoelasticity, by mechanically testing human DCM and HCM heart tissue and pig disease-model tissue.
Miqin Zhang
University of Washington, WA·Biomedical Engineering
Test how the composition and stiffness of chitosan–alginate (CA) scaffolds control human induced pluripotent stem cell self-renewal, and whether optimized scaffolds support long-term growth of tooth epithelial stem cells and neural crest cells.
The school
University of Minnesota: 88 labs on PI Pages, $1.4B a year on research, 722 research doctorates a year.
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