Engineering vascularized tissues: from building blocks to disease models

Signaling between different cell types is a critical mechanism that directs tissue formation and function. In particular, vascular cells have been shown to produce angiocrine signals that influence tissue repair and disease via communication with surrounding tissue-resident cells. Identifying and understanding the angiocrine signals that guide tissue development, regeneration, and dysfunction will provide a new class of biological cues with which to design therapies for regenerative medicine and disease mitigation. However, our ability to study angiocrine signals is limited by a lack of tractable models with which to investigate cell-cell communication within vascularized tissue microenvironments. Thus, in this talk, I will discuss my efforts to engineer vascularized tissue platforms as models for disease. First, I will demonstrate how synthetic biology and cell engineering tools can be employed to tune vascular formation and maturation within engineered tissues. Then, I will highlight how vascularized biomaterials can be applied as models for brain cancer. Overall, my work provides a framework for designing and employing vascularized tissues as biological models to study the contributions of cell-cell communication to tissue function.