Bioimaging and -sensing from In Vitro to In Silico Personalized Medicine

Abstract:

The future of personalized medicine is based on a number of novel technologies. Human embryonic (hESC) and recently human induced pluripotent stem cells (hIPSC) provide means to produce most human cell types and thus provide means to get patient own cells for in vitro disease models and for drug testing. New technologies are needed to assess the cell functions including imaging and measurement system. In addition to in vitro technologies we can also utilize computational models of these patient specific to mimic the cellular functions in silico to speed up research.

We have developed novel methods based on electrophysiological sensing as well as 2D and 3D bioimaging to assess the stem cell based constructs. For example, we have developed methods to assess functions of stem cell derived neuronal networks and cardiac cell electrophysiology as well as mechanobiology of cardiomyocytes in vitro. Further, we have developed in silico models of various cellular function including multi-cell-type neuronal networks including astrocytes to evaluate the role of astrocytes in neuronal systems. There we could show that astrocytes modulate the neuronal activity in health and neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s. We also have developed in silico models of the hIPSC CMs providing us ion channel level models of hIPSC derived cardiomyocyte electrophysiology. We have shown that these computational models can be developed also representing cells with specific ion channel mutations, e.g., long QT syndrome, showing that the pathological condition observed in cardiac scale is seen also in vitro and can be modelled in silico.

The future use of stem cell technology for personalized medicine will need a number of various engineering expertise. The multimodal sensing, imaging and computational modelling have their role on understanding the causes of behavior initiated by the gene mutations as well as for pre-screening of compounds for drug optimization.

Biography:

Professor Jari Hyttinen leads the group of Computational Biophysics and Imaging (www.tut.fi/cbig) at Tampere University of Technology, BioMediTech. Currently he is also the president of the European Alliance on Medical and Biological Engineering Sciences (www.embec.org). Main research interest is on development of technologies for future personalized medicine based on bioimaging and sensing and in-silico modelling of biology.

Project Researcher Kerstin Lenk is currently working in Prof. Jari Hyttinen’s Computational Biophysics and Imaging Group (CBIG) at Tampere University of Technology/BioMediTech in Tampere, Finland. Her research field is in silico and in vivo modeling of neuron-astrocyte networks.