Modern medical technology is pretty good at making damaged organs and tissues last longer or function better. However, with the exception of organ transplants, it’s not possible to replace damaged tissue—like cardiac muscle lost during a heart attack or lung tissue damaged by an infection.
Mai Ngo, a new assistant professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, hopes to change that. Ngo is developing techniques that will advance regenerative medicine, a multidisciplinary field in which researchers aim to replace damaged or diseased tissues and organs through tissue engineering, cellular therapies, artificial organs and other strategies.
“We’re going to be building human tissue models in order to study how different cell types within a tissue talk to each other,” says Ngo. “And in studying the cell-cell communication within these engineered tissues, we’re hoping to elucidate the control knobs by which these cell-cell interactions contribute to processes within tissue development, tissue repair and regeneration, or disease progression.”
Ngo attended Virginia Tech as an undergraduate, drawn to chemical engineering because it combined her love of chemistry and math. At the same time, two family members were experiencing cancer, which got her thinking about the broader impact of her work. During an undergraduate research experience, she helped develop a new type of polymeric foam, which she thought might have applications in tissue engineering. That helped her choose a path for graduate school.
At the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Ngo worked on tissue engineering and biomaterials; in particular, she developed three-dimensional tissue models to study how tumor cells interact with blood vessels in the brain. From there, she moved to Boston University as a postdoctoral researcher to learn new skills in molecular biology, cell engineering, and microfabrication.
“My lab at Wisconsin is going to combine elements of all of the skills that I’ve gained in my training,” she says.
In particular, she plans to build tissue models to study how different cell types in tissues communicate. “It can be combinations of many things, like cancer cells and blood vessels or immune cells and fat cells. Using this knowledge, I then hope to be able to repurpose these tissue models into therapies that we can implant inside the body, such that we can control regenerative events or improve disease outcomes by controlling cell-cell signaling.”
Ngo says she also wants to develop human tissue models for drug and toxicity screening.
“There are environmental contaminants and chemicals that we as humans are exposed to on a daily basis, but we don’t really know the impact those exposures have on our bodies, just because we don’t have models to study these types of questions,” she says. “So I’m really interested in using or repurposing these tissue models that we’re building to study the effects of toxicity or drug exposures on human health.”
Ngo says UW-Madison is an ideal place for her lab, which will be housed in the new, state-of-the-art Bluemke Family Bioengineering Laboratory in Engineering Hall. Research already taking place in CBE by Howard Curler Distinguished Professor Eric Shusta and Milton J. and A. Maude Shoemaker Professor Sean Palecek has a direct synergy with her work. The College of Engineering’s Nanoscale Fabrication Center and facilities will allow her to build microfluidic devices that enable the development of vascularized tissue, or tissue with blood vessels, to create accurate tissue models. And the university’s strong biomedical research focus as well as the nearby hospital and cancer treatment center means Ngo will have the opportunity to take her research from the lab bench to the clinic all on one campus.
“Overall, I think Wisconsin just has this amazing strength in stem cells and regenerative medicine across CBE, biomedical engineering and all of these other institutes on campus,” she says. “I’m really excited to work with everyone and collaborate on those types of projects.”