CAREER: Novel Magnetic Material Platforms for Probing Mechanobiology in Space and Time

About This Grant

This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award will support research that intends to advance fundamental understanding of how cells and tissue communicate information about their mechanical environment. Changes in the mechanics of tissues can occur locally in disease, such as stiffening of the tissue after myocardial infarction or wounds in other tissues. Importantly, the impact of local stiffening can spread after injury causing fibrosis, which can interfere with normal function. There is a gap in knowledge surrounding the mechanisms of this mechanobiological spread in space and time and closing this gap can inform new strategies to treat disease. This research project intends to develop new platforms based on magnetic materials that can be locally stiffened in time with precise control over location to mimic different biological events. This project will use experiments to explore how far, how fast, and through what channels this local stiffening is spread through surrounding cells. The research objectives of this project are coupled with educational objectives that seek to stimulate knowledge and interest in STEM. This will be accomplished through the development of captivating board games that teach mechanobiology principles and involvement of the local community through an afterschool science program. The overarching goal of this research is to understand how mechanobiological signaling is transduced via communication between cells away from a region of local stiffness change and matrix-cell signaling. The project intends to develop material platforms with the ability to change their local stiffness dynamically via the application of a magnetic field. Experiments locally manipulating the stiffness and measuring the mechanoresponses away from the local area will be performed with varying size, strength, duration, and rate of stiffening to measure the distance and speed signaling travels. The mechanobiological pathway governing how matrix-cell signaling influences cell-cell signaling over space and time will be interrogated via controlled inhibition experiments to reveal fundamental mechanisms. Experiments will be performed with both 2D and 3D models to consider the role of increased tissue complexity in this signaling pathway. If successful, this project will introduce a new class of tools that can provide unique insight into spatiotemporal mechanobiology and significantly advance our understanding of dynamic biological processes including wound healing or myocardial infarction. This project is jointly funded by Biomechanics and Mechanobiology (BMMB) Program in the Division of Civil, Mechanical, and Manufacturing Innovation (CMMI) and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR). This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.