Engineering cardiac tissues regeneration and repair
Principal Investigator: Rosemary Smith (Electrical Engineering, UMaine)
Partners: Scott D. Collins (UMaine), Douglas Sawyer (MMC/MMCRI)
Abstract: Each year, nearly one million Americans have a heart attack (myocardial infarction, MI). Patient outcomes are highly variable, but all suffer some loss of cardiac function due to permanent tissue damage. This seed project is an interdisciplinary collaboration between the University of Maine (UMaine) and Maine Medical Center Research Institute (MMCRI) that aims to develop cardiac tissue regeneration and repair strategies at the molecular and cellular level. This research initiative will apply recent advancements at UMaine in microsystems engineering to direct the differentiation of embryonic stem cells into complex spatially-organized tissue in vitro.