EAGER/Collaborative Research: High-throughput, Autonomous Real-time Monitoring of Tissue Mechanical Property Change via Impedimetric Sensor Arrays

This EArly-concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER) will support research to improve engineered tissues. Engineered tissues have become important platforms for the development of therapeutics for many diseases and disorders. They hold particular promise for improving wound healing.

Cells sense and respond their environment. How they sense their environment effects how they form tissues. How a cell's local environment affects it's behavior during wound healing is still not well understood.

There have been substantial strides that have been made in the use of engineered tissues for disease modeling and drug development. However, simultaneously monitoring cellular behavior and tissue properties remains a challenge, and limits further advances. This project will create autonomous tissue culture monitoring platforms that enable real-time monitoring of multi-scale cellular behavior and tissue properties.

If successful, scalable and high-throughput methods for autonomous monitoring of engineered tissues will be realized. This could have profound and broad socioeconomic benefits in terms of public health and drug discovery. The project will engage students through research experiences for undergraduates in data acquisition for autonomous life sciences research.

The goal of this project is to advance the ability to simultaneously quantify the dynamic multi-scale attributes of engineered tissues in real time. The central approach is to establish the feasibility of a novel autonomous sensor-based experimental platform for dynamically quantifying bulk extracellular matrix (ECM) mechanical properties, multi-cellular anatomical structures, cell phenotypes, and gene and protein expression during wound healing processes using sensor-integrated 3D cell culture models.

The work involves the following research objectives: 1) to utilize a cantilever sensor-integrated well plate format for autonomous monitoring of a fibroblast-Schwann cell 3D co-culture model treated with exogenous transforming growth factor (TGF-β) to invoke a wound healing response, and 2) to compare real-time changes in bulk ECM mechanical properties with temporal changes in gene and protein expression levels in 3D co-culture models. This work will yield the first quantitative description of the dynamic relationship between real-time ECM mechanical changes and cell behaviors in tissues undergoing wound healing.

The project also provides research experiences for undergraduate students in data acquisition for autonomous tissue characterization and bioprocess monitoring.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.