John Wikswo's Biography

John Wikswo, Gordon A. Cain University Professor, A.B. Learned Professor of Living State Physics; Founding Director, Vanderbilt Institute for Integrative Biosystems, Vanderbilt University

John Wikswo is the Gordon A. Cain University Professor at Vanderbilt University and is the founding Director of the Vanderbilt Institute for Integrative Biosystems Research and Education. Trained as a physicist, he received his B.A. degree from the University of Virginia, and his PhD. from Stanford University. He has been on the Vanderbilt faculty since 1977. His research has included superconducting magnetometry, the measurement and modeling of cardiac, neural and gastric electric and magnetic fields, and non-destructive testing of aging aircraft. His group’s current work on organ-on-chips focuses on the development of intelligent well plates that serve as perfusion controllers, microclinical analyzers, and microformulators; developing a blood-brain-barrier and a cardiac tissue construct on a chip; and integrating multiple organs to create a milli-homunculus from coupled organs on chips. As a tenured member of the Departments of Biomedical Engineering, Molecular Physiology & Biophysics, and Physics & Astronomy, he is guiding the development of microfabricated devices, optical instruments, and software for studying how living cells interact with each other and their environment and respond to drugs, chemical/biological agents, and other toxins, thereby providing insights into systems biology, physiology, medicine, and toxicology. He has over 250 publications, is a fellow of seven professional societies, and has received 39 patents.

The Biological and Technical Challenges of MicroPhysiological Systems: Past, Present, and Future

Tuesday, 29 September 2020 at 15:00

Add to Calendar ▼2020-09-29 15:00:002020-09-29 16:00:00Europe/LondonThe Biological and Technical Challenges of MicroPhysiological Systems: Past, Present, and FutureOrgan-on-a-Chip 2020 in Virtual ConferenceVirtual ConferenceSELECTBIOenquiries@selectbiosciences.com

We must celebrate a decade of microphysiological systems (MPS) research in the US that began with the 2010 papers on Shuler’s and Esch’s body on a chip and the Huh’s, Ingber’s, and colleagues’ lung on a chip, received critical funding impulses from FDA, DARPA, NIH, and DTRA, and was forged by NIH/NCATS into a large, functional community. NASA, EPA, and other agencies are expanding the scope of research. Academic groups are publishing more than a thousand papers a year and there are more than a dozen companies in the US and Europe offering single- and multiple-organ chips and platforms. Now would be a good time to assess how well MPS researchers have addressed the engineering challenges for instrumenting and controlling integrated organ-on-chip systems that I enumerated in 2013, compare the capabilities and weaknesses of organoids and tissue chips, and assess the current and future value of coupled organ systems. As we address the early challenges, some remain and new ones appear: How do we obtain or create the appropriate cells? How do we build low-cost, disposable pumps and valves to perfuse and couple organ chips? What are our alternatives to PDMS? How do we acquire and analyze the data required for quantitative characterization of our MPS models? How do we recapitulate the adaptive immune system? What are our capabilities to control, rather than just observe, MPS models? How do we address the complexity, for example, of the neurohumeral connections between the microbiome-gut-immune-liver-brain axis in development, health, aging, and disease and with exposure to pathogens and toxins? All of these technologies should help us close the hermeneutic circle of biology, particularly now that we are within striking distance of being able to create robot scientists that can operate 10,000 independent, parallel MPS models and use optimum design-of-experiment techniques to generate and test hypotheses about biological regulation. The second MPS decade should be productive and exciting.

Add to Calendar ▼2020-09-28 00:00:002020-09-30 00:00:00Europe/LondonOrgan-on-a-Chip 2020Organ-on-a-Chip 2020 in Virtual ConferenceVirtual ConferenceSELECTBIOenquiries@selectbiosciences.com

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