Friday, June 16th, 2023. Time: 12 noon

Face-to-face - O.C. Zienkiewicz Conference Room, C1 Building, UPC Campus Nord, Barcelona

ABSTRACT

Congenital Heart Disease (CHD) results when the heart abnormally develops before birth. With diminished cardiac function, the heart fails to supply the required oxygenated blood to the body, causing a cascade of failures at different scales that prevent the newborn from growing normally. Even with improved surgical and medical treatments, CHD remains a lifelong risk factor for many diseases. An emerging application in cardiac tissue engineering is the 3D bioprinting of human hearts, or their parts, for clinical transplantation, with CHD representing a potential therapeutic target. Whereas the fabrication of bioartificial hearts is currently feasible, there remain significant scientific and technological challenges that yet need to be overcome. The development of novel experimental approaches is fundamental. At the same time, there is a pressing need for complementary computational methods to efficiently assist in the design of biophysically feasible and printable hearts, which must necessarily grow with the CHD patient’s body while adapting to lifelong changes in hemodynamic conditions. In this talk, I will discuss a novel and interrelated experimental and computational approach for reproducing and predicting growing conditions of bioengineered hearts, which will drive advances in regenerative medicine and tissue engineering to accelerate the development of the bioengineered heart of the future.

SPEAKER CV

Dr. Marcos Latorre is an Aeronautical Engineer (2009) from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) with End-of-Degree awards from COIAE and ITP Aero. After working as a development engineer at ITP (2010), he began his research in computational biomechanics of soft solids and biological tissues at UPM, receiving the doctorate extraordinary award (2015). From 2017 to 2021, he did a stay in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Yale University (New Haven, USA), focusing his research on the development of mathematical and computational models of growth and remodeling (G&R) for cardiovascular tissue and tissue engineered vascular grafts. For his contributions as a young researcher to the field of computational solid mechanics, he has received the awards K.J. Bathe 2018 by Elsevier and J.C. Simó 2021 by the Spanish Society of Computational Mechanics and Computational Engineering (SEMNI). In 2022 he joined the Center for Research and Innovation in Bioengineering (Ci2B) of the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) with an attraction-of-talent fellowship María Zambrano to develop coupled computational models of G&R, electrical activity, and mechanical contraction of the heart. With the ERC Starting Grant G-CYBERHEART* (2022-2027), he is setting up a new line of research and lab at Ci2B to advance in the 3D bioprinting of regenerative bioartificial ventricles by integrating advanced theoretical, computational, and experimental approaches in cardiac tissue engineering.


*G-CYBERHEART - Funded by the European Research Council - Grant Agreement No. 101039349

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Seminar Programme 2023