Jenna Wilson and Douglas White, second-year IGERT trainees, presented at the Society for Biological Engineering’s 3rd International Conference on Stem Cell Engineering in April 2012. The meeting brought together engineers, biologists, and clinicians who are working on cellular therapies to accelerate progress towards designing the stem cell and its environment.

This conference focused on the advancement of stem cell research and tissue engineering with regards to biology, tissue regeneration and development of cell-based therapies. These approaches are contributing to the development of applied efforts in stem cell biology and engineering that can combine to aid in the development of stem cell therapeutics and bioprocesses.

Jenna presented on the microfluidic single-cell analysis of embryoid body heterogeneity. Her abstract detailed the need for single cell analysis techniques in order to assess heterogeneous cell types, particularly pluripotent stem cells. She has been developing a microfluidic approach to analyze the individual phenotypes of the cells from single EBs. Through her research, she has found that the use of a microfluidic device can provide a better evaluation on the efficacy and efficiency of directed differentiation methods by parsing out single cell dynamics from broad population-based information.

Doug presented on his development of a computational model which can predict phenotypic changes of embryonic stem cells (ESCs) in 3-D embryoid bodies. His research objective is to utilize rules based spatial and cellular modeling to provide insight into the underlying mechanisms governing cell fate transitions in 3-dimensional microenvironments experienced by pluripotent stem cells. Through his research, he has found that the state transition between pluripotency is largely modulated by local regulatory networks.