Engineering Newsletter

Hayden Huang | Biomedical Engineering

Arrhythymogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy (ARVC), which affects one in 5,000 people worldwide, is a leading cause of sudden death. With this disorder, fibro-fatty tissue replaces healthy heart muscle, and the heart’s beating becomes uncoordinated. As a result, the heart can’t pump well.

With ARVC as their inspiration, Hayden Huang and his team are figuring out how heart cells respond to physical stresses. ARVC can be caused by genetic mutations that affect proteins which link cells together. Huang is testing whether changes in these proteins interfere with how cells stick together and send signals, making the heart less able to withstand the stresses associated with constant pumping and ultimately damaging its tissue. To do so, he looks at factors such as cell stiffness (how hard it is to deform the cell), cell adhesion (how well cells stick to surfaces or to each other), cell structure (what the cell is made of and how the components are arranged), and cell response (how cells react to a physical stresses, like being stretched).

Once Huang and his team unravel the mystery of how heart cells work and how ARVC progresses, they can help develop a diagnostic test to determine who suffers from the condition, which can be asymptomatic for a long time, and formulate a treatment to repair or prevent changes in the heart muscle. They also want to solve the mystery of why ARVC primarily affects the right heart when the left heart apparently does most of the heavy work. This research will help scientists better understand the differences between the two sides of the heart and heart function in general.

Huang received his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is teaching the Tissue and Molecular Engineering Laboratory and is slated to teach Fluid Biomechanics.