Engineering Newsletter

Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic | Biomedical Engineering

In 2009, an estimated 785,000 Americans will have a new coronary attack, and about 470,000 will have a recurrent attack, while more than 35 million Americans suffer from TMJ — temporomandibular joint disorders. What is the connection? The work of Professor Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic of the Department of Biomedical Engineering, who is building complex human tissues that may help resolve both these debilitating conditions.

“As a biomedical engineer actively involved in this field, I look forward to unlocking the full regenerative potential of human stem cells, so we can cure disease and live longer than our failing organs,” she says.

Whether it is bone or muscle, the fundamental engineering and developmental biology principles are the same. As director of Columbia’s Laboratory for Stem Cells and Tissue Engineering, Vunjak-Novakovic uses biomimetics, “the science of imitating nature,” to create environments promoting tissue development or regeneration.

Each tissue should ideally receive its own kind of scaffolding and its own culture environment. To engineer thick, vascularized, and electromechanically functional cardiac tissue, Vunjak-Novakovic cultures stem cells, the actual “tissue engineers,” on a channeled elastomer scaffold perfused with culture medium containing oxygen carriers, to mimic blood flow. Electrical field stimulation is applied during culture to mimic electrical pacing within the heart.

This research may lead to a heart patch that could be laid over injured heart tissue to restore normal function in someone who has suffered a heart attack. Another promising application for engineered cardiac tissue is drug testing. The use of patient-specific engineered human tissues, instead of cells alone or in animal models, may be a way to determine the drug’s actual effect on the ultimate user.

Vunjak-Novakovic’s work in craniofacial tissues is now concentrated on the human mandibular condyle, the end of the lower jaw. This only moving part in the head has a complex structure and function, and is not easy to restore. Her goal is to produce a fully functional, anatomically shaped vascularized graft to replace a worn TMJ.

When she came to SEAS in 2005, Vunjak-Novakovic helped design her own top-of-the-line lab for human stem cells and functional tissue engineering in the Vanderbilt Clinic on the University Heights campus. Her lab hosts the Bioreactor Core of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Tissue Engineering Resource Center, just renewed for another five years. With its “bioreactor shop,” and a group of 25 talented students and postdocs, the lab is the place to go if you need an advanced culture system. Last year she led the team of 26 investigators to bring to SEAS a new Stem Cell Functional Imaging Core, established through a grant awarded by New York State’s Stem Cell Board.

“This sophisticated bioreactor and imaging instrumentation has moved stem cell research from the ‘flat biology’ of petri dishes to controllable models of high biological fidelity, which can be studied in real time to observe the interacting factors mediating self-renewal and differentiation of stem cells,” she says. “We now have the capacity to develop entirely new research paradigms and approaches to engineering human tissues.”

Vunjak-Novakovic is one of the country’s leading tissue engineers. She received her PhD degree in chemical engineering from the University of Belgrade, and was at the Harvard-MIT Division for Health Sciences and Technology for 12 years before coming to SEAS. She is a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, one of 70 women in the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame, the chair of her NIH study section, and a highly cited author of more than 240 scientific articles and two textbooks.