PhD position 3D printing a heart model (m/w/d)

Background of the project: Establishing vascularized three-layered human heart models for therapeutic approaches to heart diseases: Heart disease (HD) is the most common cause of death. Despite decades of research, no effective treatment exists to induce functional recovery from HD and no system mirroring the complexity of the heart is available to test the efficacy of novel drugs. Currently, pre-clinical studies rely on animal models, which showed to have an insufficient predictive value, and on 2D in vitro cell culture models, which do not reliably mimic the complex heart function. Consequently, these models provide insufficient insights in human HD mechanisms and are insufficient to discover novel drugs. These model limitations have led to target exhaustion and low chances of drug success in clinical trials. Therefore, there is an urgent need for new human predictive pre-clinical disease models. To overcome these limitations, the goal is to develop a development-inspired vascularized three-layered human heart ventricle model. This will be achieved by 3D-printing myocardium in a ventricular shape with in- and outlet that will be coated with an inner endothelial and outer epicardial cell layer based on hiPSCs and subsequent maturation with biochemical and mechanical stimuli.