Rogy receives Society for Biomaterials travel award
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Richard and Loan Hill Department of Biomedical Engineering PhD student Michael Rogy received the Society for Biomaterials Student Travel Achievement Recognition (STAR) award.
The award recognizes highly scored and ranked research excellence and develops future leaders within the Society for Biomaterials.
Rogy received the award for his research titled “Engineering Controlled Size Lung Organoids for Physiological In Vitro Modeling of the Alveolar Epithelium”.
Typically, alveolar organoids, three-dimensional, self-organizing structures derived from alveolar epithelial progenitor cells that can mimic the structure and function of human alveolar tissue, are formed in bulk droplets. Due to this, there can be variability within and between bulk droplets, which can lead to a number of technical confounders, like variable organoid size, heterogeneous cell populations, and matrix remodeling, potentially leading to inconclusive experimental results.
Using existing technology with an optimized extracellular matrix and alveolar epithelial cells, Rogy developed a high-throughput method for organoid formation.
Typically, conventional methods for these organoids form 100-200 droplets at a time, whereas their new method forms 10,000 – 20,000 droplets at a time.
Rogy’s research focused on producing a high number of these alveolar organoids for stable models of disease progression and compound screening.
“What’s exciting is that this platform can be expanded to address gaps in current alveolar models, including the incorporation of lung-specific endothelial cells to better study cellular interactions within the alveolar niche,” he said. “I have a very similar model with the liver work where we have these microtissues that are coated with liver-specific endothelial cells. Now, we’re leveraging that experience towards engineering a separate research inquiry.”
His research addresses a gap in the lung research field, where it is difficult to mimic the in-vivo physiology of alveolar epithelial and endothelial cells. More specifically, it is difficult to maintain cell-to-cell interactions of the organoids. Rogy plans to continue working to fabricate microtissues that form the organoids and coat them with endothelial cells to culture them with an air-liquid interface at the same time, mimicking the in-vivo physiology.
“It was nice showcasing the Microfabricated Tissue Models Laboratory biological and engineering expertise,” Rogy said of his experience at the conference. The lab is directed by Richard and Loan Hill Department of Biomedical Engineering Associate Department Head, Director of Graduate Studies, and Robert Uyetani Collegiate Professor Salman Khetani.
He added that he enjoyed seeing UIC recognized for its research and his highly rated abstract.
“It’s exciting that UIC is involved with these other universities and that showcases the caliber of the research that we do,” he said.
This research is done in collaboration with CADMIM and Sanofi.