“Artificial tissues for personalized medicine: A powerful tool for healthcare and drug development” by Dr. Alison McGuigan (1996, Metallurgy and Material Science)

Abstract

Artificial tissues offer the opportunity to model the biology and responses of specific humans in a dish and provide a basis for developing next-generation personalized therapeutics for a range of common and rare human diseases, and, importantly, for diseases that have no reliable animal models and therefore no current therapy options. Adoption of artificial tissues to transform therapy discovery and to enable personalized treatments and modelling of dynamic processes in diseases at scale however requires significant engineering innovations including platform scaling to allow robust tissue manufacturing and integration of patient materials to model patient diversity and development of image informatics and high-dimensionality analysis methods to assess complex cell functions at a practically useful throughput. This talk will highlight our team’s efforts to begin addressing these major challenges to enable manufacturing and analysis of artificial tissues at scale to study disease biology.

 

Dr Alison McGuigan (1996, Metallurgy and Material Science)

Dr. Alison McGuigan (1996, Metallurgy and Material Science) is a Professor in Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry and the Institute for Biomedical Engineering at University of Toronto. She holds a Canada Research Chair in Tissue Engineering and Disease Modelling. She obtained her undergraduate degree from University of Oxford in Metallurgy and Material Science, her PhD in Chemical Engineering from University of Toronto, and completed Post Doctoral Fellowships at Harvard University in Microfluidics and Microfabrication and Stanford School of Medicine in developmental biology. She then established her own research group at University of Toronto in 2009. Dr. McGuigan has made pioneering contributions to the engineering of tissue models to explore mechanisms of disease and regeneration. Her team exploits materials and engineering technologies to create artificial tissues in a dish which can be used to develop and discover new drugs, decide which drugs to give to which people, and potentially to predict which people are likely to get sick from specific diseases and when. Dr. McGuigan has received numerous awards and honors including being elected to the Royal Society of Canada-College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists and elected a Fellow of the Canadian National Academy of Engineering.

 

All alumni and friends are welcome to join us for this online talk.

 

Date

27 January, 2025

Time

6.00pm

Venue

Online

Price

Free