Week 1: An Intro To Bioengineering And Vasculature
March 10, 2023
Hello everyone! Welcome to my blog of incredibly interesting and boring things(and everything in between). As a quick introduction, we’ll first discuss the concept of bioengineering and vasculature. So let’s begin…
Bioengineering: “A rapidly growing and ever-evolving field of study, bioengineering combines engineering and the life sciences in ways that advance scientific discovery, healthcare and medicine, manufacturing, agriculture, education and policy” (Stanford | Bioengineering). So if biology, medicine, and engineering had an entire village of babies, bioengineering would describe all of them. From passing conversations, I’ve found that bioengineering and biomedical engineering can and are whatever you want them to be—prosthetics, organ-on-a-chips, regenerative medicine, engineered tissues, instrumentation, drugs, therapies, etc. Even though bioengineering is an incredibly vague term, I’m interested in tissue engineering!!
Tissue engineering: Tissue engineering is the science behind engineering different tissues in your body – fixing, augmenting, and synthesizing them. So… how? Every tissue in your body is made from three general components: Cells, chemical markers, and an Extracellular Matric (ECM). Think of it as a house. If the ECM is the bare interior of the house, the chemical markers would be all of the appliances and furniture and the cells would be the house’s inhabitants. To understand how to engineer tissues to be as close as possible to native (our own) tissue, bioengineers need to understand tissue microanatomy. The microenvironment, including the ECM and neighboring cells, all directly affect a cell’s differentiation, function, and purpose. This idea of understanding tissue microanatomy is what my project is all about.
Vasculature: There is one aspect of tissue engineering that has stumped researchers for as long as the field has existed. Whether oxygen, vitamins, minerals, hormones, or some other macromolecule, cells require nutrients to survive and cells get all their nutrients from blood. In fact, cells don’t typically grow more than 100 micrometers from the nearest blood supply. Native tissue does form vasculature or blood vessel networks through a process called angiogenesis and vasculogenesis; however, researchers have not been able to create complex vascular networks in vivo or outside a living organism. That is why I have chosen to focus my research project on understanding the vasculature of pancreatic Islets of Langerhans. And I will delve into why I have chosen Pancreatic Islets next week so stay tuned for that.
Thank you to those who got this far and I hope you have a wonderful week!
Bioengineering. (n.d.). Retrieved March 10, 2023, from https://bioengineering.stanford.edu/#:~:text=A%20rapidly%20growing%20and%20ever,%2C%20agriculture%2C%20education%20and%20policy.
S;, P. (n.d.). Vasculogenesis and angiogenesis. Cancer treatment and research. Retrieved March 10, 2023, from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15015550/#:~:text=Angiogenesis%20is%20responsible%20for%20the,intussusceptive%20microvascular%20growth%20(IMG).