2E: Engineering Heart and Lung Models to Study Disease Progression and Therapeutic Development

This session focuses on leveraging biomaterials to create models of the heart and lung, including engineered tissues, organoid, and/or organs-on-a-chip, and how these systems can be leveraged to understand disease processes and as a testbed to identify and test potential therapeutics. These models can be used to develop treatments for acute conditions such as virus infections, to investigate mechanisms of chronic disease progression, for toxicology testing, and overcome the limitations of animal models used for cardio-pulmonary research. Approaches that combine in vitro models with state-of-the-art techniques for phenotyping, including bulk and spatially resolved omics technologies and cutting-edge data analysis and visualization such as machine learning are also encouraged