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SEAS Incubates New Generation of Engineered Tissue

For Professor Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic, it was the culture of Columbia and New York City and “the enormous potential to build things” that brought her from MIT to the Engineering School. Since her arrival in July, she has developed collaborations with researchers in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, where she is a full professor, as well as with colleagues in the schools of medicine and dentistry. She recently received more than $5 million in new research grants for craniofacial and cardiac tissue engineering, two areas that are among her research specialties.

“I didn’t leave MIT because I was unhappy,” emphasizes Prof. Vunjak-Novakovic, “but because Columbia offered a wonderful environment with active biomedical research and the opportunity to establish a strong program at the interface of engineering and medicine.” Part of this effort is a top of the line lab for human stem cells and functional tissue engineering, funded by SEAS, that is built in the Vanderbilt Clinic on the University Heights campus to provide resources for tissue engineering research. Open spaces will foster communication among the researchers. This presents unique opportunities for strong ties with the dental and medical school colleagues, now that she is concentrating on building the craniofacial tissues and vascularized cardiac muscle.

Dr. Vunjak-Novakovic explains that tissue engineering combines principles of engineering and developmental biology to give the body the help it needs to repair or regenerate damaged tissue. She has worked on complex skeletal tissues and will be concentrating on the mandibular condyle, the end of the lower jaw, the only moving part in the head. This condyle joins the lower jaw to the temporal bone of the skull, and it has a complex structure and important function that are not easy to restore. Temporomandibular joint disorders have been found a source of much facial pain and discomfort, a problem that could be alleviated by engineering a functional condyle to replace the worn tissue that is causing pain.

One way of engineering functional living tissues is to use biomimetics, “the science of imitating nature,” and create an environment that mimics conditions in the body. “Clearly, each tissue requires its own kind of scaffolding and its own culture environment, and the ‘recipes’ we use will be different from one tissue to another,” she says.

To engineer a synchronously contracting cardiac tissue, cells are cultured on an elastic, channeled scaffold perfused with culture medium containing oxygen carriers (to mimic blood flow) and electrical field stimulation is applied during culture (to mimic electrical pacing within the heart). The hope is that this engineered tissue, which can be produced in only eight days, may be able to patch areas of the human heart that have been damaged.

A chemical engineer by training, Dr. Vunjak-Novakovic received her B.S., S.M., and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Belgrade. She became a professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Belgrade. In 1992, she received a Fulbright Fellowship, spent her sabbatical at Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology and established collaborations that made her stay at MIT for 12 years.

As one of the leading tissue engineers, she is a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, has published more than 160 scientific articles, 20 patents and a textbook, served on editorial boards and review panels, chaired conferences and mentored “the best group of students there is.”