Everhart Lecture

Lab-engineered tissues designed to replace or repair damaged organs promise to provide alternatives for transplants. Organ function, however, emerges from the interaction of various cell types and scaffolding fibers. This creates a formidable design challenge, as components relevant to function must be identified and recapitulated.  Conversely, while the pool of bio-engineered materials might be limited, their combinatorial powers are potentially endless and hard to predict.  What is needed, therefore, is a design strategy for matching desired organ properties with bio-engineered solutions. One way of approaching this issue is to choose "intermediate" design problems that share some but not all of the features of human organs. I will present our proof-of-concept study in which we analyze propulsion in juvenile jellyfish to create a freely swimming artificial jellyfish from rat muscle and silicone rubber. Jellyfish represent muscular pumps that transport liquid through gentle and rhythmic pulsation – just like a beating heart - but they are of much simpler build and produce easily accessible flow patterns. This has allowed us to 1) identify the elements of jellyfish tissue that generate pumping function, 2) design and tissue-engineer an artificial jellyfish that shares those elements, and 3) iteratively improve the design by evaluating the performances of real and artificial jellyfish.

Light refreshments will be served following the lecture. All members of the Caltech community are encouraged to attend!