Our focus is to develop approaches to accelerate the maturation of bioengineered cardiac muscles to adult-like tissue. The ‘mini muscles’ we generate in a dish act and function like the heart muscles in your body but they are still immature and does not fully recapitulate an adult tissue.
Impact
Identifying key factors to mature bioengineered 3D cardiac organoids or ‘mini muscles’ in a dish to an adult like phenotype will provide a platform to model diseases complications such as childhood myopathies in order to develop bvnew therapeutic targets and strategies.
reNEW research
8 months
reNEW Melbourne’s Muscle Bioengineering group led by A/Prof Richard Mills and his team, including Dr. Natasha Tuano generate cardiac and skeletal bioengineered tissue derived from pluripotent stem cells that can be used to model diseases.
Image description
Cardiac organoid that has been sectioned at 10um thickeness and stained with markers involved in the contraction of cardiac muscle
Credits
Dr. Natasha Tuano,
Richard Mills Lab (Muscle Bioengineering), MCRI