IAA funding award

Patient stem cell-derived cardiac cells on topographies

EPSRC has awarded Impact Acceleration Accounts funding to Dr Aishah Nasir for research into: “Chemo-topography” synthetic surfaces for human pluripotent stem cell derived cardiomyocyte maturation

Impact Acceleration Accounts (IAAs) are strategic awards provided to institutions to support knowledge exchange (KE) and impact from their previously EPSRC funded research. IAAs allow Research Organisations to respond to opportunities in flexible, responsive and creative ways, aligned to their institutional strategies.

The £46,000 of funding has been awarded to produce be-spoked culture systems for cardiac cells using fully defined synthetic polymer chemistries and topographically enhanced surfaces. It is hoped that this work will improve cardiovascular disease modelling by improving the use of stem cell-derived cardiac cells in biomedical and clinical applications.

This work builds upon the ChemoTopoChip platform which identified immunomodulatory, osteo-inductive and anti-bacterial surfaces using combinatorial technologies produced here at the University and at TU/e in collaboration with Jan de Boer (further information here ). Dr Nasir aims to utilise these methodologies to produce and investigate scale-ups of cardiac specific surfaces which could have potential use in drug-screening platforms to assess toxicity profiles of patient stem cell-derived cardiac cells.