Salman R. Khetani
Associate Professor of Bioengineering
University of Illinois at Chicago
Seminar Information
Animal models have been utilized for several decades now for drug development, disease modeling, and to test the efficacy of implantable human tissue constructs. While these models are an important bridge to human clinical trials, it has become clear over many high-profile drug failures that animals do not suffice on their own for preclinical investigations due to significant differences in organ-specific molecular pathways across different species. Therefore, the field of 'tissue engineering' has aimed to create human-relevant tissue culture platforms that can complement and in some cases, replace animal testing altogether. To build such platforms, tissue engineers face common challenges such as sustainable cell sourcing, cell phenotypic stability in vitro, and scaling the constructs for different applications. In this seminar, I will present how we and others have addressed such challenges via state-of-the-art microfabrication tools adapted from the semiconductor industry, novel biomaterials, stem cell differentiation strategies, and multicellular co-cultures. I will present culture platform development within the context of the liver, which is a difficult organ to engineer in vitro due to its many diverse functions, complex architecture, and multiple types of self- and non-self cellular interactions. Since in vitro culture platforms are only as good as the applications which can be effectively targeted with them, I will next present the utility of our engineered human liver platforms for drug toxicity screening, disease modeling (e.g. non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and hepatitis B viral infection), and regenerative medicine; data sets acquired in collaboration with pharmaceutical companies through successful commercial translation will be presented where available. Lastly, I will discuss emerging trends and pending issues that will need to be addressed to fully realize the benefits of the ‘organ-on-a-chip’ revolution, which has garnered substantial attention and funding from the US government. Ultimately, engineered tissues will most likely be one of the most important contributions of bioengineering to 21st-century healthcare.
Dr. Khetani received his dual BS degrees in electrical engineering and biomedical engineering from Marquette University, and MS and PhD degrees in bioengineering from UCSD. He was a Jacobs fellow and NSF graduate fellow at UCSD. After postdoctoral research at MIT, Dr. Khetani co-founded and directed research at Hepregen Corporation to commercialize his bioengineered liver inventions for pharmaceutical drug development. In 2011, Dr. Khetani returned to academia, first to Colorado State University and then as associate professor of Bioengineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where his ‘Microfabricated Tissue Models’ laboratory (http://mtm.uic.edu/) designs and implements novel engineered tissues for drug screening, investigations of global human diseases, and regenerative medicine. Dr. Khetani’s 48+ publications in journals such as Hepatology, Nature Biotechnology, and PNAS have been cited more than 3000 times with an h-index of 25. Lastly, Dr. Khetani’s research has been generously funded over the last 10 years via $4.1M in grants from the NIH, NSF, DOD, FDA, and the NSF CAREER award.