Symposium on Biofabrication for Emulating Biological Tissues, Fall Materials Research Society National Meeting; Boston, Massachusetts; November 29 to December 4, 2020

这笔资金用于资助大约10名本科生、研究生、博士后或代表不足的女性和初级教员，参加2020年11月29日至12月4日在马萨诸塞州波士顿举行的秋季材料研究会全国会议上举行的“用于模拟生物组织的生物制造”研讨会。2020计划将扩展为一个为期4天的研讨会，将由17-20个受邀演讲和大约60个贡献演讲组成。周二晚上(2020年12月2日)还将举行一次海报会议，这将为研究人员提供展示他们的研究并以个人和非正式方式与他人接触的机会。本次研讨会旨在汇聚来自学术界、工业界和政府机构社区的跨学科专业知识，包括材料科学、物理、化学、工程、生物科学和医学，他们专注于先进制造技术的开发，以生成基于人体的组织模型，以模仿其本土同行。此外，这次研讨会将为在该领域工作的科学家和工程师提供一个交流的平台，并促进涵盖这些不同学科的思想和技术的交流。最重要的是，研讨会将为初级教师、博士后研究员、研究生和来自代表性不足群体的研究人员提供机会，在一个跨学科和充满活力的国际研讨会上展示研究成果。组委会致力于招募和促进妇女和少数民族学生、博士后和教职员工参加会议。人们越来越认识到，基于平面、静态形式的传统和过于简单化的细胞培养策略不能再现生物组织的功能和复杂性。利用先进材料和生物材料制作的微型仿生3D组织模型，当在微流体电路中相互连接在一起时，可以忠实地概括人类组织和器官系统的结构、生物学、生理学、区划和互联。这些系统潜在地能够准确预测人类对药物化合物的反应，并促进对纳米药物、化学品和生物物种的高含量测试。在过去的十年中，材料科学和微流体技术的进步提高了开发组织模型的能力，使其成为简单和可重复的平台，通过加入细胞、其相关基质和微环境线索等生物材料来概括组织水平的功能。由于减少了所需的细胞、动物和试剂的数量，因此在微型通道中使用流体是具有成本效益的，从而使其进一步可扩展。在相关方面，生物制造技术的快速发展使仿生微环境能够模拟建筑保真度，在不同的生物材料上施加剪应力、应变和/或界面。材料方面的进步将继续推动体外组织建模领域的发展，因为它有助于改进细胞-指导细胞外基质线索，而生物制造将使成功创建复杂的人体组织微环境所需的改进的3D空间控制和动力学成为可能。由这笔赠款部分资助的研讨会将涵盖跨学科的主题，从材料科学、物理、化学、工程、生物科学和医学，重点是用于产生微生理系统或芯片上器官平台的先进制造技术，以及在基础研究和翻译研究中的应用。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This grant provides funding to partially support about 10 undergraduate students, graduate students, postdocs, or under-represented, female, and junior faculty to attend and present at the symposium on “Biofabrication for Emulating Biological Tissues” at the Fall Materials Research Society National Meeting in Boston, Massachusetts, November 29 to December 4, 2020. The 2020 program is being expanded into a 4-day symposium that will be composed of 17-20 invited talks and approximately 60 contributed talks. One additional poster session will be held on Tuesday evening (December 2, 2020) and this will offer opportunities for investigators to present their research and engage with others on an individual and informal basis. This symposium aims to bring together interdisciplinary expertise spanning from materials science, physics, chemistry, engineering, biological sciences, and medicine from the academic, industrial, and government agency communities, who focus on the developments of advanced manufacturing technologies for the generation of human based tissue models for emulating their native counterparts. In addition, this symposium will provide a platform for communications of scientists and engineers working in the area and promote cross-fertilization of ideas and technologies encompassing these different disciplines. Most importantly, the symposium will facilitate opportunities for junior faculties, postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, and researchers from underrepresented groups to present research results in an interdisciplinary and dynamic international symposium. The organizing committee is strongly committed to recruiting and promoting women and minority students, postdocs, and faculty to attend the meeting.It is increasingly recognized that conventional and oversimplified cell culture strategies based on the planar, static formats cannot reproduce the function and complexity of biological tissues. Miniaturized biomimetic 3D tissue models fabricated using advanced materials and biomaterials, when interconnected together in a microfluidic circuit, can faithfully recapitulate the structure, biology, physiology, compartmentalization, and interconnectivity of human tissue and organ systems. These systems potentially enable accurate prediction of human responses towards pharmaceutical compounds, and facilitate high-content testing of nanomedicines, chemicals, and biological species. In the past decade, advances in materials science and microfluidics technologies have improved the capacity in the development of tissue models as simple and reproducible platforms that recapitulate tissue-level functions through incorporation of biological materials such as cells, their associated matrices, and microenvironmental cues. The utilization of fluids in micro-sized channels is cost-effective due to reductions in the quantity of cells, animals, and reagents required, making it further scalable. In a related way, rapid advancement in biofabrication technologies have enabled the creation of biomimetic microenvironments to emulate architectural fidelity, apply shear stress, strain, and/or interfaces on different biological materials. The advances in materials will continue to drive the field of in vitro tissue modeling by contributing to improved cell-instructive extracellular matrix cues, while biofabrication will enable improved 3D spatial control and dynamics required for the successful creation of the complex human tissue microenvironments. The symposium partially supported by this grant will cover interdisciplinary topics spanning from materials science, physics, chemistry, engineering, biological sciences, and medicine with an emphasis on advanced manufacturing technologies for generating microphysiological systems or organ-on-chip platforms, towards applications in both fundamental studies and translational research.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.