Recent advances in manufacturing techniques have enabled the development of platforms and devices to study tissues and cells within well defined 3D microenvironments. Current devices have many limitations, however, because they are primarily made with polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS). PDMS is soft, so it is difficult to create reliable fluid connections...

­Cancer is a leading cause of death around the world, accounting for nearly 10 million deaths in 2020 according to the WHO. Common cancer therapies, particularly chemotherapeutics, tend to be expensive with a relatively low rate of success. Further, they take a toll on the patient’s body. Personalized therapeutics, while more successful, require...

There are an estimated 23 million people with heart failure worldwide, with 1-year mortality rate of 30% following onset. Loss of cardiomyocytes (CMs) from myocardial infarction results in remodeling and abnormal stress distribution throughout the tissue, leading to increased morbidity. Regenerative medicine and tissue engineering strategies offer promising...

The tumor microenvironment is a complex milieu consisting of numerous cell types, packed in an extracellular matrix, along with a dense network of capillaries. Research has shown that crosstalk between cancer cells and the microenvironment has great influence on the potential for metastasis and disease progression, however the lack of physiologically...

Each year, millions of patients, globally, suffer from heart failure and cardiovascular disease. Stem cell transplantation and tissue engineering strategies have tremendous potential for repair and/or regeneration of injured myocardium. The major hurdles in stem cell transplantation are poor cell survival, insufficient cardiogenic differentiation,...