Grant: Collaborative Health Research Projects (NSERC partnered)

Cell-based therapies hold tremendous potential to repair damaged tissue but the central problem confronting ALL cell-based therapeutics lies in promoting meaningful long-term engraftment of transplanted cells. Recently, we developed a novel microfluidic platform to encapsulate cardiovascular progenitor cells in protective hydrogel cocoons, promoting cell viability while improving engraftment within injured tissue and providing markedly improved therapeutic benefits. However, this therapeutic effect is ultimately ephemeral as transplanted egress their protective hydrogel microcapsules rapidly and typically fail to be retained for more than a few additional days in the targeted tissue, thus limiting their full therapeutic impact. Our vision is to overcome these limitations by exploiting the ability of cell-type specific biomaterials and by using novel microencapsulation strategies to extend cell viability, while ensuring tissue persistence upon engraftment, ultimately promoting therapeutic repair of injured tissue. With broad implications in cellular therapeutics, we have found that this is particularly relevant to chronic lung disease of prematurity, the main complication of preterm birth, to the treatment of pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH), and to cardiac injury repair, in which we have shown the protective effects of MSCs, EPCs and EDCs in vivo. We are working with Northern Therapeutics, a Canadian biotechnology company, to ensure this research will be widely applicable to the field of regenerative medicine, be of marked benefit to chronically ill patients, aide in the global competitiveness of a Canadian company, and stimulate economic development in Canada in an emerging new market.