Area 15D/E Life Sciences Plenary Award: Engineered systems for controlling cellular microenvironments: from designing synthetic extracellular matrices to probing cell responses in disease models

The properties of the microenvironment in which cells reside, from structure to mechanics and biochemical content, increasingly are recognized as important drivers of cell function and fate, including in the onset and progression of disease (e.g., fibrosis and cancer recurrence). Engineering materials to mimic key features of these complex microenvironments offers unique opportunities to probe and direct cellular functions and to study specific diseases in the lab. In this presentation, our recent efforts to design reductionist synthetic mimics of complex collagen-rich microenvironments will be overviewed. Specific applications of these and other engineered systems for the creation of multidimensional controlled cell culture models to study specific diseases will be discussed. Further, the opportunity that ‘omics’ tools provide for interrogation of cell responses within these engineered systems, from benchmarking versus in vivo and patient data to obtaining unique insights into cellular responses, also will be highlighted. This multipronged approach to understanding cell-microenvironment interactions is providing new tools and insights for addressing currently intractable diseases, including lung fibrosis and late cancer recurrence.