Cardiac Bioengineering

We have brought together engineering and cell biology disciplines to develop human cardiac organoid screening platforms. This enables us to perform screening and large scale ‘omics’ experiments to determine how contractile function is controlled and what goes wrong in disease.

Our cardiac organoids are derived from human pluripotent stem cells, enabling unlimited production and fabrication of organoids from multiple different genetic backgrounds. Importantly, our cardiac organoids are multicellular and are comprised of many of the important heart cells including cardiomyocytes, fibroblasts, endothelial cells, smooth muscle cells and epicardial cells. Over the past 15 years, we have discovered conditions that enhance maturation of our cardiac organoids so that they reliably model human heart function. Together, these unique properties enable disease modelling and drug screening approaches that can be more reliably translated to the clinic.

More recently as part of our Snow Medical Fellowship program, we have put considerable effort into developing a robust semi-automated process for 96-well plate screening for function, RNA-sequencing and proteomics. This enables us to employ large scale biological discovery screens, drug screening and systems biology studies. While each of these is individually powerful, we have brought all these together to provide unprecedented mechanistic understanding of how heart function is controlled and can be enhanced.

• Snow Medical Fellowship Hudson SMRF-2019-060 (PI) 2021-2028. A heart in a computer to identify new heart failure therapeutics
• reNew Disease Team Grant . Hudson (PI) 2021-2027. Development of a bioengineered heart tissue patch for heart failure patients with underlying congenital heart disease.