Keynote Speaker: Dr. Sanjay Kumar

Tales from the fourth dimension: Incorporating the element of time into biomaterial paradigms

ABSTRACT

It is increasingly accepted that cell and extracellular matrix structure and mechanics can drive biology and disease, influencing everything from metabolism to stem cell differentiation to tumor progression.   While significant progress has been made in developing culture technologies that mimic the complex physical microenvironment of tissue, many of these platforms are comparatively static in nature.   There remains a need to understand how cell-matrix dynamics influence cell behavior.  For example, how do cells remodel the carefully constructed matrices in which we place them, and how does this remodeling drive the biology we observe?  And how does the time-dependent dissipation of cell-imposed stresses influence force-based signaling?  While the answers are far from clear, I will describe efforts our team has made to attack these challenging problems, ranging from the use of proteomics to characterize the matrisome of invasive tumor cells ensconced within 3D matrices to to development and application of viscoelastic matrices to probe effects of stress relaxation on stem cell lineage commitment.