Grant: Collaborative Health Research Projects

Cell-based therapies hold tremendous potential to repair damaged tissue but the centralproblem confronting ALL cell-based therapeutics lies in promoting meaningful long-termengraftment of transplanted cells. Recently, we developed a novel microfluidic platform toencapsulate cardiovascular progenitor cells in protective hydrogel cocoons, promoting cellviability while improving engraftment within injured tissue and providing markedly improvedtherapeutic benefits. However, this therapeutic effect is ultimately ephemeral as transplantedegress their protective hydrogel microcapsules rapidly and typically fail to be retained formore than a few additional days in the targeted tissue, thus limiting their full therapeuticimpact. Our vision is to overcome these limitations by exploiting the ability of cell-type specificbiomaterials and by using novel microencapsulation strategies to extend cell viability, whileensuring tissue persistence upon engraftment, ultimately promoting therapeutic repair ofinjured tissue. With broad implications in cellular therapeutics, we have found that this isparticularly relevant to chronic lung disease of prematurity, the main complication of pretermbirth, 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 areworking with Northern Therapeutics, a Canadian biotechnology company, to ensure thisresearch will be widely applicable to the field of regenerative medicine, be of marked benefitto chronically ill patients, aide in the global competitiveness of a Canadian company, andstimulate economic development in Canada in an emerging new market.