Jungwoo Lee's Biography

Jungwoo Lee, Assistant Professor, University of Massachusetts-Amherst

Jungwoo Lee is an assistant professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering and a principle investigator at the Institute for Applied Life Sciences at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. He received his Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering at the University of Michigan and post-doctoral training at the Center for Engineering in Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital and Shriners Hospitals in Children at Boston. He has published over 35 research papers in the field of biomaterials and tissue engineering (H-index=29, > 3,500 citations). With core expertise in biomaterials, micro-fabrication, cellular engineering, and biomedical imaging, his lab aims to develop tissue-engineered hematopoietic bone marrow models. These models are applied for better understanding the bone marrow tissue microenvironments and associated stem cell and cancer biology. His research has been supported by National Cancer Institute.

Tissue Engineered Microenvironments For Studying Human Tumor Metastasis

Friday, 17 March 2017 at 11:00

Add to Calendar ▼2017-03-17 11:00:002017-03-17 12:00:00Europe/LondonTissue Engineered Microenvironments For Studying Human Tumor MetastasisSELECTBIOenquiries@selectbiosciences.com

Disseminated tumor cells (DTCs) undergo varying periods of dormancy in ectopic tissue sites before developing overt metastatic tumors. Accumulating evidence suggests that metastatic dormancy and recurrence of DTCs is regulated by intrinsic genetic instability and close interaction with the surrounding microenvironment. Yet, the mechanism by which DTCs enter and escape dormancy remains largely uncertain due to the lack of model systems that can capture the initial activity of extremely rare DTCs. Here, we introduce a bioengineered approach to capture the critical events regulated by the extrinsic tissue microenvironments on DTCs with high experimental control and fidelity. We first developed human soluble factor enriched and vascularized microenvironments by subdermally implanting human bone marrow stromal cell preseeded scaffolds into immunodeficient NSG mice. Humanized tissue analogues recruited circulating human tumor cells released from physiologically relevant orthotopic xenograft tumors. Tail-vein delivery of human peripheral blood mononuclear cells further increased cellular complexity. Established human stromal-tumor-immune niches were serially transplanted into naïve NSG mice for continuous monitoring of metastatic tumor development. Our approach successfully recapitulated the heterogeneous phenotypes, dormant and aggressive, of DTCs and demonstrated human stromal and immune cell derived niche regulation.

Add to Calendar ▼2017-03-16 00:00:002017-03-17 00:00:00Europe/London3D-Bioprinting, Tissue Engineering and Synthetic BiologySELECTBIOenquiries@selectbiosciences.com

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