January 27th, 2021 at 4PM EST

Sarvesh Varma, PhD – MIT-GSK Gertrude B. Elion Research Fellow (Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) at MIT

“Engineered Toolkits for Monitoring Phenotypic Transitions in Vascular Health and Disease”

Human endothelial cells (hECs) constantly experience spatiotemporal variations in external microenvironment (e.g. blood flows), which couple with their intrinsic (e.g. genetic) regulation to define an overall disease-protective or disease-susceptible phenotype. However, current approaches to understand such complex interplay of phenotypic regulators have had limited ability to emulate disease-regulating flows, and to further perturb or monitor hECs within such context. This seminar will present research in engineering physical platforms (e.g. microfluidic devices) for emulating the natural hEC microenvironment; biological tools (e.g. genetic reporters) for defining intrinsic/extrinsic regulators of hEC states; and computational methodologies (e.g. imaging) for monitoring how such regulators sway hECs between health and disease in humans. Such engineered toolkits collectively overcome several outstanding limitations of existing methods, enable discovery of unexplored human vascular biology, and motivate novel strategies for combating deadly cardiovascular diseases in the clinic.

Matthew Paul Lech – Pfizer

“Implementing Technologies to Increase Success in the Clinic”

The drug development process is undergoing an evolution to include more complex models that can improve success in the clinic by better predicting the human response.  At Pfizer, we look at many different technologies and systems to meet this need.  This discussion will provide an overview of current efforts and a vision of the future in the field of MPS and complex model utilization.