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- What is your lab, and what do you research there?
- So my lab, we work at the interface
between engineering and biology.
And that simply means that we're trying to engineer
the human body, particularly the brain and spinal cord.
And if we can create models of the brain and spinal cord
here in our lab, then we can use those models
to study how those organs develop
and to study how they go wrong
when you have some type of disease
or defect in those particular tissues.
So engineers in general take raw materials,
such as oil or trees [laughs]
and we turn them into usable products
such as gasoline or paper.
And so for my lab,
we're trying to create human tissues.
And so we start with human stem cells.
- What is a stem cell?
- So a stem cell is the very earliest, primitive cell type
that we have in the human body.
So when an egg meets a sperm and you have a zygote
that forms very, very, early, right?
The first cell of your body.
The very first couple of cells that form off of that
we call human embryonic stem cells.
And that's because they have the potential
to become any cell in the human body.
- So a stem cell is essentially a cell
that hasn't decided what function it wants to perform
within the body, so they can become a brain cell,
a heart cell, skin cell, lung cell, any kind of cell.
- How are you able to engineer with stem cells?
- One technique that we use out of many in the lab
is to use engineering tools
to shape the growth of the stem cells.
So if you can imagine in baking, for example,
let's say you're making like a Valentine's Day cake
and you want to create a shape of a heart.
Well, to do that by hand is very difficult, right?
You don't really shape the cake with your hands to do the heart.
You take a mold, and then you can pour
your liquid mixture into that.
And then you provide, you put that in the oven
to provide some sort of heating
so that it can become a cake, right?
And it will have the shape of that cake.
So we create the shape
that we want to have our cells grow into,
and because we're making a neural tube,
we are interested in creating tubular shapes.
- How do you make stem cells do what you want them to do?
- In a similar way that you smell some cookies being baked,
[laughs] and that can make you hungry,
or you touch something that is hot, you can think of it that
essentially, we can apply cues to that cell culture dish,
where the stem cells in a similar manner
will react to those cues.
And we can make the surface they grow on hard or soft.
We can make the environment they grow in
only able to fit, for example, a hundred stem cells,
or able to fit 10,000 stem cells.
And when you change all those factors,
it changes the collective environment around the cell.
And we sort of tune those factors
in order to try to get the stem cells to differentiate
and create tissues in the manner that we see fit.
- How do you engineer something so small?
- This is a big challenge, right?
And trying to engineer something this small,
I can give you an example of one of my experiments.
So the way that we create our tubes
is actually injecting stem cells inside of a mold, right?
A hydrogel mold.
But I cannot actually see the channel or the cells
by eye at all.
To do this, what we use is a microscope.
So we have a microscope that we can put our gels,
our hydrogels in so that we can actually see a channel
that is 250 microns in size.
And you can imagine that
that's like the size of basically a hair.
So, of one hair.
Or maybe smaller than that.
So it's very, very small,
but the microscope basically magnifies the image
so that we can see it as big as a pencil, basically.
And then we can use a needle and inject into that channel
and do everything under the microscope.
- If you think about the fact
that computers used to take up full rooms
and now we're able to communicate with each other
with laptops that have all this little microcircuitry,
we're doing really similar things.
We're using chemistry and we're using physics
in order to make smaller and smaller structures
that can help the cells organize into the ways that we want.
- Do you think your experiments will change the world?
If so, how?
- Yeah, I think our research is gonna be very impactful.
It's gonna take a lot of time
because there are a lot of things that we don't understand
about the body that we're still learning.
And to really make something that is impactful and useful,
it's important that we take our time,
that we do our experiments correctly,
and that we're able to then really make things
that are relevant for patients.
- It's about changing lives,
about educating the people around us,
just learning more about how the human body works.
And making small contributions really lead up to,
in the long run, people being able to make great discoveries
and great medical advances that are gonna help human lives.
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