- Are you fascinated by the potential of using gene therapy and bioengineering to provide immune shielding to living heart valves?
- Are you intrigued by understanding the processes of keeping heart valves alive outside of the body?
- Are you eager to contribute to better and sustainable healthcare at the interface of engineering and biology?
- Are you passionate about inspiring and mentoring students and working in a high-end collaborative and interdisciplinary research environment?
- Are you our next PhD candidate in bioengineering immune shielded living heart valves?
The Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) is seeking a highly-talented, ambitious and passionate PhD candidate to investigate and further develop our model of bioengineering immune shielded living heart valves. We aim to develop a way to keep heart valves alive outside of the human body and further understand how we can shield living heart valves from immune-mediated degeneration. As the successful candidate, your research with us will contribute to broader efforts to protect living cardiac tissues from immune rejection and to advance our understanding of immune tolerance, as part of our consortia funded by the Dutch Heart Foundation and ZonMW.
Information In our group, we work to improve heart valve replacements in young children born with congenital heart disease. The current valve replacement options available in clinical practice cannot grow with the growing heart of a child and can elicit immune responses that destroy and calcify implanted valves. Therefore, these young patients require multiple invasive operations throughout their lives. In our group “Soft Tissue Engineering and Mechanobiology” we investigate whether we can develop a living valve that can grow with the heart and is safe from immune rejection. Alongside our advances in in-situ tissue engineering (TE) of heart valves, we investigate immunoengineering of biological valves as an alternative approach. We have developed lentiviral gene delivery systems to introduce genes in the valves that can prevent them from being recognized by immune cells. Further unraveling the optimal mechanisms to shield tissue from immune rejection and keep heart valves alive outside of the human body are essential components to move this approach forward.
You will generate unprecedented experimental data as a pioneer in the field to unravel these mechanisms with the goal of shielding heart valves from immune rejection. Your investigations will combine knowledge from the fields of placental immune tolerance and placental organoids and sophisticated in vitro experiments that mimic the in vivo immune responses in the valve. Furthermore, you will build upon our work on bioreactors for tissue-engineered heart valves and in-house experience in heart perfusion models to build a system that can maintain viable heart valves outside of the human body.
To that end, your research will include a selection of techniques including: i) in vitro (co-)cultures using primary human cells as well as advanced analytical methods for cellular phenotyping, such as RNA-sequencing ii) tissue culture and sophisticated tissue analysis including advanced microscopy, iii) flow-based bioreactor development and testing, iv) immune cell co-culture assays. You are expected to write a doctoral thesis and publish your research results in scientific journals. A small part of your doctoral position will involve teaching in courses as well as the supervision of students at the bachelor’s and master’s levels offered by the group. Also, an educational and professional development program will be offered to you.
Embedding You will be embedded in a highly inspiring research environment, both socially and professionally, which facilitates access to high-end research facilities, as well as fosters interdisciplinary collaborations. You will be an integral member of the Soft Tissue Engineering and Mechanobiology (STEM) group of the Department Biomedical Engineering, and specifically operate at the interface of the teams led by dr Marijn Peters (Translational Cardiovascular Immunoshielding) and prof Carlijn Bouten (Cell-Matrix Interactions for Cardiovascular Tissue Regeneration) at the Department of Biomedical Engineering at TU/e. You will also work together with the team of Prof. Bas van Rijn (Perinatal Health and Technology) to build upon their work of in vitro placental models to study and unravel the successful mechanisms of immune tolerance as found in the placenta.
Your project is part of our consortium with the BIOSHIELD consortium of the Hartstichting and ZonMW Off Road project: BIOengineering immune Shielded Heart valve Implants: Engineering Living Donor tissue by translating prenatal protection mechanisms from the womb to the heart. In this consortium, we work together with cardiothoracic surgery and transplantation immunology at the University Medical Center Utrecht and the Wilhelmina Children’s Hospital and the ETB-Bislife Multi Tissue Center. We stimulate and foster cross-institutional collaborations as part of the project.