Aidan Gilchrist Receives $2M MIRA Award to Understand How the Body’s Environment Influences Cellular Health
The body has many mechanical responses to meet its environment. In a hot bath, blood vessels widen to improve blood flow and help cool the body down. Pupils narrow to protect the retina when transitioning from a dark room to a sunny porch.
At the cellular scale, mechanical responses to tissues help cells meet their metabolic needs. Known as the mechano-metabolic link, these mechanical responses have implications for health but are not well understood.
Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering Aidan Gilchrist leads a new research program at the University of California, Davis, to understand how the extracellular matrix (the space surrounding a cell) plays a vital role in normal and abnormal cellular metabolism states, and therefore in creating well-being or disease.
The research is made possible by a more than $2 million Maximizing Investigators' Research Award, or MIRA, from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, part of the National Institutes of Health.
MIRA celebrates researchers whose work demonstrates outstanding potential to improve understanding of biological processes and establish the groundwork for advancements in disease diagnosis, treatment and prevention.
“I am very excited to receive this funding,” Gilchrist said. “It provides critical support to pursue new scientific directions in stem cell biology and biomaterials design and will help train the next generation of scientists and engineers in the lab.”
Over the next five years, Gilchrist and his team will investigate interactions across stiff and pliable tissues, cell maturity (young, old, in between) and different tissue compositions in the extracellular matrix. To do this, they will use stem cells and in-vitro polymeric hydrogel systems to simulate cells in an extracellular matrix.
Gilchrist’s team will also explore how the elasticity of tissues influences cellular uptake of metabolic precursors, such as lipids — the building blocks for more complex materials like amino acids.
“By leveraging biomaterials design and human stem cells, we aim to understand how cells and their environment interact to regulate metabolism,” Gilchrist said. “Defining the mechanisms underlying this mechano-metabolic link is an exciting challenge that could open new avenues for understanding normal and aberrant biology in aging and disease.”