The Synthetic Biological Engineering of Self-Assembling Micro-Hearts for Cardiac Drug Testing

由于缺乏准确预测药物疗效和安全性的有效实验室组织/疾病模型，药物开发变得越来越昂贵和耗时。在这个奖学金中，我将通过将合成生物学与组织工程相结合来应对这一挑战。专注于心脏药物测试，我将通过合成生物学对干细胞进行重新编程，使其自动自组装成直径0.5-1毫米的小型球形心脏组织结构(即微型心脏)。合成的生物工程微型心脏满足了有效心脏药物测试工具的所有要求，而且比目前使用的方法更便宜。作为一种有效和廉价的药物测试工具，它将有助于降低药物开发的成本，帮助制药行业--一个88亿GB的英国行业--生存和蓬勃发展。更便宜、更有效的心脏药物将减轻英国国民健康保险制度(NHS)110亿英镑的心血管疾病负担，并改善目前英国700万患有心血管疾病的人的生活质量。

Pharmaceutical drug development is increasingly more expensive and time consuming due to the lack of effective laboratory tissue/disease models that accurately predict drug efficacy and safety. In this fellowship I will address this challenge by combining synthetic biology with tissue engineering. Focusing on cardiac drug testing, I will reprogram stem cells through synthetic biology to automatically self-assemble into small, 0.5-1 mm diameter spherical heart tissue constructs (i.e. micro-hearts). Synthetic biologically engineered micro-hearts satisfy all requirements of an effective cardiac drug testing tool, and are cheaper than currently used methodologies. As an effective and inexpensive drug testing tool it will help reduce the cost of drug development, helping the pharmaceutical industry, an £8.8 billion UK sector, survive and thrive. Cheaper and more effective cardiac drugs will lessen the £11 billion burden of cardiovascular diseases on the NHS, and improve the quality of life of the 7 million people living with these diseases today in the UK.