Reverse Bioengineering to understand, “Who are we?”

Abstract

My ultimate research goal is to re-create living systems, like human and animals, in vitro. I named this new research field, “Reverse Bioengineering”. To open up this field, we focus on pluripotent stem cells (PSCs) and micro/nanoengineering. PSCs are promising tools, because of their capability for elucidating the fundamentals of the developmental processes of living organisms, but it remains challenging to obtain fully functional tissues/organs from PSCs due to improper cellular environments. In contrast, micro/nanoengineering approach allows to create proper cellular microenvironments for organ development, which conventional macro-scale techniques could not provide. Therefore, the integration of stem cell biology and micro/nanoengineering allows us to recapitulate and understand organ developmental processes within a microchip. Moreover, microfluidic technology provides an artificial blood circulatory system to inter-connect multiple organs, and investigate how they communicate each other, namely “Body on a Chip (BoC).” This BoC is one of the outcomes of Reverse Bioengineering, and I would like to present my works of on-chip development of liver and its diseases as well as early embryogenesis.