Details
Speaker: Sasha Cai Lesher-Pérez , PhD
Assistant professor, Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Michigan
U-M’s Biointerfaces Institute, Department of Biomedical Engineering.
Talk Title: “The clock is ticking – Why it’s time to engineer biorhythms for in vitro tissue culture systems”
Abstract:
The mechanistic study of pathophysiology and therapeutic action has long relied upon the use of engineered in vitro cell culture systems. These systems, however, lack the periodic fluctuations, or biorhythms, in the cellular microenvironment that effectively integrate “time” into these culture platforms by providing physiological inputs necessary for cellular synchronization and circadian rhythms. Given the central role that circadian rhythms play in health and disease, this absence is puzzling. For example, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, osteoarthritis, and asthma, are just a few diseases with known circadian rhythm effects. Moreover, more than half of the top 100 selling drugs target the product of a circadian gene, and multiple clinical trials have retrospectively shown the impact of time-of-day dosing on improved outcomes and increased patient lifespan. The underlying
Bio:
Dr. Sasha Cai Lesher-Pérez is an assistant professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Michigan. He is also a member of U-M’s Biointerfaces Institute and holds a courtesy appointment in the Department of Biomedical Engineering.
Dr. Lesher-Pérez earned his B.S. in biomedical engineering from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and his Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from the University of Michigan. He completed his postdoctoral training at the University of California, Los Angeles. Before joining U-M, he was a Marie Curie Fellow at Elvesys SAS, a microfluidic instrumentation company in Paris, France, and a biomedical engineer at Intelligent Optical Systems in Torrance, California.
The Lesher-Pérez Lab integrates microfluidics, biomaterials, and tissue engineering to establish physiomimetic culture environments that advance the development of microphysiological model systems. A major focus of the lab is engineering dynamic microenvironments that incorporate temporal stimuli to more accurately represent time-dependent biological processes in vitro and emulate the homeostatic fluctuations observed in human physiology. By integrating biorhythms in vitro, the lab aims to exploit these orchestration and instructional cues as levers to manufacture increasingly physiologically relevant tissues outside the body. Dr. Lesher-Pérez’s long-term goal is to determine how biorhythms and their disruption affect human health.