Regenerative Medicine

We will focus on an approach that will involve generation of organs or organ components based on an understanding of embryonic development, mimicking the latter to the greatest extent possible.  A crucial component of this will involve the understanding and demonstrating the ability to recapitulate the interplay between cell differentiation and spatio-molecular signaling pathways. It is envisioned that the general approach will follow the paradigm: generation of induced pluripotent stem cells, reprogramming of such cells into the critical cellular components of a mature organ, bioreactor design for scale-up of cell production, scaffold generation, either de novo or on decellularized organs, and 3D bioprinting of cells to create the nascent organ. The technology thrust, integrative analysis of multi-scale, multimodal imaging/sensor data will play a key enabling role in this research at almost every critical step as combined sophisticated imaging will allow investigators to gain experimental insights into spatial-molecular signaling, cell differentiation and cell migration and its recapitulation of embryonic organogenesis.  At Stony Brook University, we are uniquely situated to take build on existing expertise in computational biology, applied math, imaging, materials science, and stem cell biology to develop a solid foundation for this regenerative medicine component of the institute.