Center Director David Bishop highlighted in BU Today
The following is an except from the article “Meet Seven BU Researchers Who are Transforming the Human Experience” published by BU Today on Friday, September 20, 2019. Article by Kat J. McAlpine.
David Bishop, who’s developing living “Band-Aids” to repair hearts damaged by heart attack, is keenly aware of the impact that his team’s work stands to have.
“Heart disease kills one in four Americans, and it’s one of the leading causes of death around the world,” says Bishop, director of BU’s CELL-MET, an engineering research center in cellular metamaterials funded by the National Science Foundation. “A lot of us are going to die from heart disease, because right now, heart attacks can’t be cured,” he says.
After a heart attack, the muscle cells that help the heart contract die off and are replaced by stiff, immovable scar tissue. “You’re permanently disabled,” Bishop says. “When heart muscle dies, your heart can’t contract as strongly and can’t eject as much blood as you did before. Cardiologists today never use the word cure; they only talk about managing your condition.”
His vision? “If someone has a heart attack, we create new cardiac tissues derived from that person’s own cells,” he says. “We create an implantable tissue patch that covers the damaged part of the heart, to restore the heart’s capacity to pump blood. The tissue patch transmits electrical signals and contracts in a twisting and squeezing motion, just like healthy heart does on its own. No foreign organ tissues involved, no immunosuppression issues.”
The CELL-MET team is 2 years into a 10-year program designed to bring the vision of a living, beating heart Band-Aid to life. Bishop and Alice White, an ENG professor and chair of mechanical engineering, bring their nanotechnology expertise to the table. CELL-MET deputy director Christopher Chen, an ENG professor of biomedical engineering and a William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor, is an expert in microchip environments that mimic the inside of a living heart. These so-called “hearts on a chip” set the essential stage that lab-grown cardiac tissues need to develop and function normally. And renowned imaging scientist Thomas Bifano, an ENG professor of mechanical engineering and director of BU’s Photonics Center, is enabling the team to see and measure every aspect of heart tissue growth, down to inconceivably small cellular parts.
“Together, leveraging our strengths, we have a shot,” Bishop says.