News
Jianyi “Jay” Zhang, M.D., Ph.D., T. Michael and Gillian Goodrich Endowed Chair of Engineering Leadership, UAB Department of Biomedical Engineering, and Professor of Medicine and of Engineering, finished 2021 with the notice of a new R01 award from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. The $2.754 million, four-year grant allows Zhang to study, “Myocardial remuscularization by cardiac patch delivery of epicardial FSTL1 and CCND2 overexpressing cadiomyocytes,” the grant’s title.
Zhang’s research suggests that promotion of myocyte proliferation and understanding the regulators of the myocyte cell cycle could have a highly significant impact on the management of heart failure. Heart failure on the cellular and molecular level occurs due to the loss of the contractile unit of the left ventricle, or cardiomyocytes. The grant aims to use bioprinted 3D cardiac tissue models to identify the cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying the myocyte pro-proliferative effect of follistatin like-1 protein (FSTL1) treatment in vitro. They will assess signaling pathways to promote remusclarization in the mouse model of myocardial infarction, and assess the pre-clinical potential of a bioengineered pre-vascularized muscle patch device in treating acute myocardial infarction in a pig model of ischemia-reperfusion.
As stated in the grant proposal, “The findings of this project will establish a novel generation of personalized cardiac patch devices for remuscularization of heart with postinfarction LV remodeling.”
Kudos to Jianyi “Jay” Zhang, M.D., Ph.D., Professor and Chair, UAB Department of Biomedical Engineering, and his lab team, who published an editorial on “Bioengineering and Biotechnology Approaches in Cardiovascular Sciences” in the journal Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology last month (doi: 10.3389/fbioe.2021.746435). The article is part of an eBook on the same topic, and has been viewed nearly 30,000 times. Collaborators include Philippe Menasché, M.D., Ph.D., Professor, UAB BME.
By Hannah Weems
Four of the five members of the second-place team are shown here working on their prototype. Pictured are (from left) Russ Fuller, Lara Tapy, Jason Zhang, and Isabella Reed.Two student teams from the Department of Biomedical Engineering placed in the top three teams overall at the 2021 UAB Expo, winning second and third place for the submission of their senior design projects.
Each year, BME undergraduates have the opportunity to participate in the Expo, offered by Service Learning and Undergraduate Research, celebrating excellence in research, creative activity, and scholarship by showcasing students’ academic endeavors. The winning projects were created as part of BME's capstone senior design course, in which students are required to present a solution to a clinical problem provided by a client and then develop a functional prototype and a plan for product commercialization. They must follow guidelines such as adhering to a $400 design budget.
Researchers used a pig model of heart attacks, which more closely resembles the human heart in size and physiology, and thus has high clinical relevance to human disease.In a large-animal study, researchers have shown that heart attack recovery is aided by injection of heart muscle cells derived from human induced pluripotent stem cell line, or hiPSCs, that overexpress cyclin D2. This research, published in the journal Circulation, used a pig model of heart attacks, which more closely resembles the human heart in size and physiology, and thus has higher clinical relevance to human disease, compared to studies in mice.
Read more: Heart attack recovery aided by injecting heart muscle cells that overexpress cyclin D2
By Hannah Weems
UAB Ph.D. student Rifqi Aufan and postdoctoral fellow Ying Jiang, M.D., were each awarded a fellowship recently from the American Heart Association (AHA).
Aufan, a Biomedical Engineering (BME) Ph.D. student in the lab of Steven Lloyd, M.D., Ph.D., assistant professor in the UAB Department of Medicine, Division of Cardiovascular Disease, received a one-year American Heart Association (AHA) Predoctoral Fellowship. Jiang, a BME postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Jianyi “Jay” Zhang, M.D., Ph.D., BME chair and professor, received a two-year AHA Postdoctoral Fellowship.
Read more: Two BME graduate students awarded American Heart Association fellowships