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Organ failure as a result of injury or disease is a widespread and increasing medical problem with immense personal and economic implications. Engineering artificial tissues is an important emerging strategy for treating patients who have suffered impaired tissue function. To be an effective treatment option, a substitute tissue must provide adequate function, comparable to the native tissue it is replacing. Native tissues are comprised of many individual cells arranged in precisely defined patterns necessary to ensure correct tissue function. Currently, engineered tissues only partially resemble native tissues in structure and do not function adequately to treat patients.

Native tissues are assembled in the developing embryo. Various signalling molecules and interactions between the component cells define tissue organization. The long-term objective of our research program is to artificially recapitulate the signalling and cell-cell interactions that organize tissues in an embryo to organize and engineer artificial tissues with appropriate structure and function.

Currently we are developing strategies to engineer artificial tissue structures by manipulating a relatively simple signalling process called planar cell polarity. This process enables cells in a developing embryo to orient and align correctly relative to neighbouring cells across an entire sheet of multi-cellular tissue. The alignment of each cell depends on the relative levels of various signalling proteins in neighbouring cells. Using a combination of molecular biology techniques and cell patterning tools we seek to manipulate communication between neighbouring cells to control tissue organization.