"Towards Personalized Healthcare Engineering: A New Paradigm in Blood Disorder Treatment"

Athanasios (Sakis) Mantalaris, Ph.D. 
Professor
Biological Systems Engineering Laboratory
Department of Chemical Engineering
Imperial College of London

Personalized medicine is a medical model that proposes the customization of healthcare, with decisions and practices being tailored to the individual patient by use of patient-specific information (initially genetics information) and/or the application of patient-specific cell-based therapies. The BioBlood project aims to deliver personalized healthcare through a “step change” in the clinical field of haemato-oncology. BioBlood represents an engineered bio-inspired integrated experimental/modeling platform for normal and abnormal haematopoiesis that receives disease & patient input (patient primary cells & patient/disease-specific data) and will produce cellular (red blood cell product) and drug (optimal drug treatment) therapies as its output. An experimental platform will be presented, which is a novel three-dimensional hollow fibre bioreactor capable of culturing normal and abnormal haematopoietic cells in the absence of exogenous growth factors by mimicking the structure and function of the bone marrow. Characterization of the experimental platform at the cellular and molecular level will be presented. In addition, the in silico platform that captures cellular heterogeneity using a population balance model (PBM) in leukaemia will also be presented. The PBM, which is able to extract patient- and disease-specific information is linked to a pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic (PD/PD) model, which is then used to optimize chemotherapy treatment in a personalized manner.

This presentation can be seen via videoconference using BlueJeans: https://bluejeans.com/179735194