MEMP PhD Thesis Defense: Amy Stoddard

Engineering Mini Livers to Grow on Demand: A Synthetic Biology Approach to Cell Therapy Scale Up

In the past decades cell therapy has emerged as a promising strategy to treat organ dysfunction and failure. Scale up of these cell therapies to sizes of therapeutic relevance, however, remains a significant challenge to the field. To address this bottleneck, we proposed an innovative solution: to implant a small-scale construct and then drive it to expand in situ after its engraftment into the host. Exploring engineered liver cell therapy as a proof-of-concept application, I describe my efforts to first define a set of signals sufficient to induce the growth of human liver tissue, and then to synthetically control these axes for on-demand induction of in situ proliferation of implanted engineered human liver cell therapy. I also discuss the functional to proliferative tradeoff that is observed in expanding tissues, and present strategies that can enable synthetic recovery of tissue function following expansion. Collectively, this work serves as an exciting first-in-class demonstration of in situ, on demand expansion of implanted engineered solid liver tissue through a “scale up by growth” strategy and lays the groundwork for a future of smart solid cell therapies that can be tuned to meet individual patient needs.

Thesis Supervisor:
Christopher S. Chen, M.D., Ph.D.
William F. Warren Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Boston University

Thesis Committee Chair:
Sangeeta N. Bhatia, M.D., Ph.D.
John J. and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Engineering, MIT

Thesis Reader:
Kristin Knouse, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Biology, MIT
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Amy Stoddard is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting

Topic: Amy Stoddard MEMP PhD Thesis Defense
Time: Thursday, May 8, 2025, 11:00 AM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

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