Joycelyn Yip is a talented biomedical engineering student at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. She is working towards her PhD, with a strong focus on using stem cells and their ability to regenerate tissue.
Joycelyn’s latest project uses stem cells to create muscle cells that are capable of mimicking the human heart. This area of research is known as tissue engineering. It is an important field that is expected to lead to significant medical breakthroughs in the coming years.
Tissue engineering is also related to another innovative medical field called personalised medicine. Personalised medicine involves the creation of drugs and medical interventions that are tailored to the specific requirements of an individual.
Being able to obtain stem cells from an individual and turn them into fully functional heart muscle cells is an important step forward for personalised medicine. For one, doctors will be able to generate heart muscles cells in a laboratory setting. They will be able to test customised drugs on those cells to determine their efficacy and the extent of side effects.
Because the heart muscle cells have come from a person’s stem cells, doctors can test how personalised treatments will affect that person specifically.
Doctors may also be able to use the cells to repair damage to the heart. Some researchers even suggest that they will someday be able to make completely new hearts for patients who need a heart transplant.
Joycelyn explains the process that will be used by the procedure “We’ll be able to go to a patient, take their skin cells, make them into stem cells and then create their own personalised cardiac tissues,”
Joycelyn is also working on another project with biologists from the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. They are trying to understand how zebrafish regenerate tissue so rapidly. If this characteristic can be replicated in humans, it may speed up how quickly they can heal.
These incredible research projects may completely change the face of medicine in coming years.
Source: Creating new heart muscle out of stem cells? This grad student is doing it
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