From lab dish to deep freeze, into your body

Fall 2024 Inventing tomorrow

University experts are standouts in the race to regenerate tissues for damaged heart and other organs

By Pauline Oo

In the field of regenerative medicine, Professor Brenda Ogle is one of the best in the country. She and her team of researchers garnered global attention for creating a high-tech patch that helps scarred cardiac tissue heal after a heart attack.

Ogle holds two advanced degrees from the University of Minnesota College of Science and Engineering and heads the Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME). She also knows how to reprogram stem cells into heart muscle cells.

However, what landed her lab on the cover of the American Heart Association’s Circulation Research journal was a method that mixed human stem cells with an “ink” made from extracellular matrix proteins to 3D print a chambered structure. In less than a month, this model beat just like a human heart.

Ogle credits the Visible Heart Laboratories (VHL) for the MRI scan that shaped the structure. The lab was established 25 years ago by Paul Iaizzo, a BME graduate program faculty advisor, in collaboration with Medtronic.

“He’s created a really nice library of MRI heart scans and pig and human heart tissue,” Ogle said.

“We’re grateful to have ongoing access to this anatomic library. We used it as digital templates for our centimeter-scale human heart pump. That study received the best manuscript of the year in a high-profile journal in the cardiovascular space.”

Cardiac ablation is another resource Ogle taps in the VHL. “Ablation is used to literally ablate or kill cardiac tissue in people with atrial fibrillation,” she explained.

“These devices have been around for a long time, and they work. But sometimes irregular heart rhythms or arrhythmias come back, and we really don’t understand why and under what conditions.”

The procedure involves guiding a catheter with electrodes through a vein or artery to fix a heart that either beats too quickly, too slowly, or irregularly.

“Our 3D model allows us to see what happens at the cellular level— why some cells are not killed and continue to beat irregularly,” Ogle said.

“Our model is living. It’s human. And it’s cardiac muscle that can be studied over time after the ablation procedure.”

The recently published study and subsequent efforts in this space are putting Minnesota on the map.

“The development of human model systems to complement animal models that have been developed in the VHL creates a strong platform for evaluating therapies before they reach the clinic,” Ogle noted. “It makes Minnesota an incredibly strong ecosystem for preclinical testing because we have animal models, reanimated human models that can last a day, and human models in a dish that can be sustained for days, weeks, and months.”

Learn how CSE researchers are "Optimizing the transplant system."

Professor Brenda Ogle with student researchers — Professor Brenda Ogle in her research lab.

Optimizing the transplant

By Emily Rice

Since her Ph.D. in applied math and subsequent postdoctoral work, Saumya Sinha, an assistant professor of industrial and systems engineering (ISyE) at the University of Minnesota, has been driven by meaningful, high-impact research. Sinha’s work on optimizing the organ transplantation system addresses an important problem: How to design organ allocation systems and policies to improve transplant access?

With regulations always evolving, today’s transplant system is designed to prioritize those who need an organ most urgently. Sinha’s work focuses on optimizing this system.

Most recently the idea of fairness has entered into her work.

“If no transplant hospital is nearby when a deceased donor organ becomes available, that organ is wasted,” she said.

“Equally, some areas of the U.S. do not have any transplant hospitals, so a patient in those areas might not have access to a life-saving transplant.”

Studying these scenarios and their outcomes promotes a transplant system that is geographically and socioeconomically equitable.

Although there have been incremental improvements in federal regulations regarding organ transplants, Sinha noted that “even if regulations remain fixed, their appropriateness will change because the medical field is changing.”

She explained that technological advances, organ transportation, and organ preservation are always improving and evolving. Sinha’s work and collaborative efforts with organizations such as M Health, the NSF Engineering Research Center for Advanced Technologies for the Preservation of Biological Systems (ATP-Bio), and the University of Minnesota Institute for Engineering in Medicine are all about informing positive changes in policy that can lead to system-wide benefits.

Sinha came to her research focus serendipitously.

“I was looking for a postdoc with an applied focus,” she recalled.

“I luckily found an opportunity with someone with a long history of research in healthcare and, in particular, organ transplantation.”

This work had her collaborating with physicians trying to understand how federal regulations impacted the behavior of transplant centers, such as hospitals that perform transplants. At the time, there were a set of regulations physicians claimed were stifling innovation and hurting patients instead of helping them.

“Our work aimed to analyze this mathematically,” she said. “Could we find evidence through mathematical modeling and data analytics to support the physicians’ claim?”

Sinha looks forward to continuing to explore the federal regulations of the organ transplant system.

“I am interested in exploring how new regulations are better than what was there before—what are the shortcomings that persist and could modification or other regulations improve upon these aspects?” she remarked. “I’m also excited to explore the technological improvements in transplant biomedicine. Whenever technology evolves, it will affect how the system operates.”

“I am broadly interested in how developments in technology interplay with regulations and allocation strategies in the transplant system as a whole.”

With its long history of operations research and systems level analysis, the world of organ transplant drives research that makes a difference.

“There is a direct practical benefit,” Sinha reflected, “but at the same time, the inherent complexity of the system makes it fertile for methodological innovation. Policymakers recognize the value of the research methods and findings. Even a small improvement is an actual life saved.”