2021

October

• Students in the MTM lab presented 11 abstracts in the form of 7 platform talks and 4 posters at the 2021 Annual Meeting of the Biomedical Engineering Society in Orlando, FL.

August

• The MTM lab, in collaboration with the Shah lab, has been awarded an NIH R21 grant to develop design rules for the bioprinting of 3D human liver tissue surrogates that have three key integrated compartments as in the human body: hepatic, vascular, and biliary. This work will advance liver co-culture systems and biomaterials most suitable for 3D printing of the liver.

July

• The MTM lab, in collaboration with the Rehman, Merrill, and Dai labs, has been awarded an NSF grant to develop synergistic microenvironmental, computational, and genetic approaches for reproducibly biofabricating functionally mature liver organoids for drug testing.
• Dr. Salman Khetani, director of the MTM lab, has been recognized by an independent website as a 'world expert' in hepatocyte culture.
• The MTM lab, in collaboration with the Pajcini Lab, has been awarded an NIH R01 grant to develop human liver models for the study and expansion of hematopoietic stem cells.
• Congratulations to Chase Monckton and Grace Brown (co-leads) for the publication of their review article entitled "Latest impact of engineered human liver platforms on drug development" in APL Bioengineering. This article has been featured on the journal's front page and a story has been written about it.

May

• Congratulations to Chase Monckton for successfully passing his preliminary examination and becoming a PhD candidate.
• Congratulations to Jennifer Liu for successfully passing her preliminary examination and becoming a PhD candidate.

April

• Congratulations to Grace Brown for being the recipient of the 2020-2021 UIC College of Engineering Graduate Student Award for Exceptional Research Promise.
• Congratulations to Jennifer Liu, Brent Ware, and Chase Monckton for having their article featured on the cover of Toxicological Sciences, a top journal in the field of Toxicology and official journal of the Society of Toxicology!
• Congratulations to MTM lab members Grace Brown for receiving the second place graduate poster presentation award, Chase Monckton for receiving the second place graduate oral presentation award, Aimee Padilla for receiving the first place undergraduate poster presentation award, Anupriya Mathews for receiving the second place undergraduate poster presentation award, and Tommy Puttrich for receiving the third place undergraduate poster presentation award at the Third Annual UIC Bioengineering Research symposium.

March

• Congratulations to David Kukla for successfully defending his doctoral dissertation! David is the first PhD graduate of the MTM lab at UIC!

2020

December

• The MTM lab has experienced considerable growth over the last 5 years at the University of Illinois at Chicago with increases in a) research expenditures by 2.3-fold, mostly through NIH and NSF grant funding, b) the numbers of publications and citations by 2-fold, and c) the number of personnel  working in the lab by 3-fold. Our alumni have gone on to secure positions/jobs at prestigious universities as graduate or postdoctoral fellows, medical device industry, pharmaceutical/biotech industry, and startup companies. We are grateful to UIC for providing us with ample lab space and shared resources to conduct our research, federal funding agencies for supporting our research, and our students/staff and collaborators for their hard-work and dedication in making as much of an impact on human health as possible within the means available to us. We look forward to the next 5 years of our lab's training of students and research accomplishments.
• Great work by Matt Davidson in which he developed a physioloigically appropriate culture medium for primary human hepatocytes that extended their functional lifetime in vitro by several weeks as compared to a conventionally utilized culture medium.
• Dr. Khetani co-chaired the 2020 Micro- and Nanotechology in Medicine (MNMC) virtual symposium hosted by IEEE/EMBS. He will co-chair the live version of this conference in December of 2021 in Hawaii.
• Dr. Khetani organized the UIC Bioengineering Virtual Symposium to showcase the research of UIC faculty and help recruit graduate students to the department.

October

• Regeant Panday, a PhD student in the MTM lab, presented his work with 3D human liver tissues (poster) at the MicroTAS 2020 conference.

The MTM lab presented 6 accepted abstracts (2 talks and 3 posters) at the Annual Meeting of the Biomedical Engineering Society.

July

• The MTM lab is collaborating and receiving funding from an NIH R01 grant (PI: Dr. Dawood Darbar, Co-I: Dr. Salman Khetani) focused on determining the genetic determinants of atrial fibrillation and help develop better therapies (with clinical trials) for patients suffering from this most common sustained arrhythmia. 
  

April

• Congratulations to Grace Brown, a PhD student in the MTM lab, for successfully passing her preliminary (proposal) examination. Grace is now a PhD Candidate.

January

• Great work by David Kukla on showing that porous and biocompatible silk scaffolds can be used to engineer human liver-like tissue that remains viable and functional for 5 months in vitro.
• The MTM lab has been awarded a National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) R01 grant to develop, in close collaboration with Dr. Dawood Darbar , Chief of the Division of Cardiology at the University of Illinois Medical School, in vitro models of atrial fibrillation (the most common sustained arrhythmia) using patient-derived induced pluripotent stem cells that can be used to elucidate underlying genetic mechanisms of this disease and for novel drug discovery.

2019

December

• The MTM lab is thankful to Professor Randal Jaffe who filmed and edited a video showcasing MTM's lab research and how we are impacting the education of physician scientists through UIC's Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP).

November

• Great work by David Brazy and Jim Young on putting together a news article on two of MTM lab's recent grants focused on imporving differentiated functions of iPSC-derived human hepatocytes.
• Great work by David Kukla on utilizing droplet microfluidics to fabricate 3D microtissues containing primary human hepatocytes and fibroblasts that showed liver functions for 6+ weeks and could predict drug effects.
  

October

• Great work by Matthew Davidson on showing that intermittent fasting (starvation) can extend the functional lifetime of primary human liver cell cultures and make them more useful for drug development assays.

September

• The MTM lab has been issued a US patent (# 10,266,806) that describes an  in vitro platform to functionally mature iPSC-derived human hepatocytes for use in drug development applications. This patent has been licensed to BioIVT for commercial distribution.
• The MTM lab has been awarded a National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) R21 grant to explore, in collaboration with the Underhill lab at UIUC, the role of key biochemical and biophysical microenvironmental cues on the functions of induced pluripotent stem cell-derived human hepatocyte-like cells +/- co-culture with liver sinusoidal endothelial cells. 
• The MTM lab has been awarded a National Science Foundation   grant to develop, in collaboration with Dr. Matthew Kipper's group   at Colorado State University, nanostructured 3-dimensional scaffolds that can be used to deliver physiological biochemical and biophysical cues to stem cell-derived human liver cells to further mature their functions in vitro for drug screening with eventual utility for regenerative medicine.

July

• Congratulations to Brent Ware and Grace Brown for having their manuscript published in Gene Expression - The Journal of Liver  Research focused on the development of a long-term mouse liver model to study the effects of genetics on drug-induced liver injury.
  

June

• The MTM lab has been awarded an NIH R21 grant to develop a scalable 3D human liver platform for investigating the pathogenesis of hepatitis B viral infection.

April

• Congratulations to David Kukla and Regeant Panday for being awarded first and second places, respectively, in the "Graduate Poster Presentation" category at The Second Annual UIC Bioengineering Research Symposium.
  
• Congratulations to Demi Ibrahim for being awarded second place in the "Undergraduate Poster Presentation" category at The Second Annual UIC Bioengineering Research Symposium.
• Congratulations to Grace Brown for being awarded second place in the "Graduate and Post doctoral Associate Oral Presentation" category at The Second Annual UIC Bioengineering Research Symposium.
• The MTM lab presented 8 abstracts, one as an oral presentation and seven as poster presentations at The Second Annual UIC Bioengineering Research Symposium. Congratulations to Grace Brown, Hardik Dabas, Demi Ibrahim, David Kukla, Jennifer Liu, Chase Monckton, Regeant Panday, and Yang Yuan for these presentations.

March

• The MTM lab has received funding from the Center for Advanced Design and Manufaturing of Integrated Microfluidics (CADMIM) to develop, in collaboration with the Eddington Lab at the University of Illinois at Chicago, a scalable 3D human liver tissue platform with integrated oxygen control for drug development.
  

February

• The MTM lab presented 3 posters at the biannual meeting of the Center for Advanced Design and Manufacturing of Integrated Microfluidics (CADMIM) in Irvine, CA. Congratulations to Jennifer Liu, Grace Brown, and David Kukla for these presentations.

2018

October

• The MTM lab presented 8 abstracts at the annual meeting of the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES), incluidng 3 oral presentations and 5 poster presentations. Congratulations to Grace Brown, David Kukla, Jennifer Liu, and Chase Monckton for these presentations.
  
• Congratulations to MTM lab alumnus, Christine Lin, for having her published article be the journal’s (Current Protocols in Toxicology) top 20 most downloaded papers from July 2016 to June 2018. 

August

• Congratulations to Hardik Dabas for being awarded the Chancellor's Undergraduate Research Award (CURA), which will fund Hardik's research in the MTM lab for academic year 2018-2019.
  

June

• Congratulations to Brent Ware for recording an outstanding video summary  of his published article in Cellular and Molecular Gastroenterology and Hepatology.
  

May

• Congratulations to Jennifer Liu, Erika Ferrari, and Fabio Pradella for successfully defending their MS theses at UIC off research conducted in the MTM lab.
• Congratulations to Grace Brown for having her manuscript published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B focused on showcasing the use of common engineering techniques for the creation of both liver and heart tissues for drug development applications.
• Dr. Salman Khetani received the "2018 Advising Award" from the UIC College of Engineering.
• Dr. Salman Khetani received the "Departmental Rising Star" award from the UIC College of Medicine. 
  

April

• Congratulations to David Kukla for being awarded the "Best Podium Presentation" and Grace Brown for being awarded "First Place in the Graduate Poster Category" at The First Annual UIC Bioengineering Research Symposium.
•  Dr. Salman Khetani received the Honoring Our Professors' Excellence (HOPE) award at UIC, given to faculty membrs who play important roles in the professional development of undergraduate students on campus.
  

March

• Congratulations to Berenice Zarate for being selected for UIC's Summer Research Opportunities Program (SROP) for undergraduates. Berenice will be conducting her research over the summer in the MTM lab.
• Congratulations to Brent Ware for having his work featured on the cover of a special 20th anniversary issue of Toxicological Sciences that highlights in the words of the editor, "...many of the visually and intellectually appealing images that have graced the covers of ToxSci." 
  

February

• The MTM lab has received funding from the Center for Advanced Design and Manufaturing of Integrated Microfluidics (CADMIM) to develop, in collaboration with the Hui lab at the University of California at Irvine, a cell patterning method using DNA template-based assembly.
• The MTM lab has been awarded an NIH R01 grant, in collaboration with the Underhill Lab at UIUC, to explore molecular mechanisms and develop a drug screening platform for non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.

2017

December

• Congratulations to Brent Ware for successfully defending his doctoral dissertation.
  
• Congratulations to Christine Lin for successfully defending her doctoral dissertation.

November

• Congratulations to Brent Ware for having his manuscript published in Cellular and Molecular Gastroenterology and Hepatology focused on developing a cell culture platform that can maintain the phenotype of both primary human hepatocytes and primary human endothelial cells for several weeks.
• Congratulations to Christine Lin for having her manuscript   published in Journal of Biomedical Materials Research - Part A focused on developing and characterizing a platform to deliver growth factors to human liver cells.
• Congratulations to Brent Ware for having his published article recommended by faculty who are part of F1000 Prime.

October

• Dr. Khetani presented MTM lab's research on a microfluidic human liver model at the annual meeting of the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) in Phoenix, AZ.
  

August

• The MTM lab has been awarded an NSF grant to develop a high-throughput microliver platform for drug toxicity screening in collaboration with Dr. David Wood's Living Devices Lab  at the University of Minnesota.
  
• Congratulations to Matthew Davidson for having his artwork featured on the cover of Integrative Biology.

July

• Congratulations to Matthew Davidson and David Kukla for their manuscript    published in Integrative Biology focused on creating and characterizing an in vitro model of the early stages of liver fibrosis for novel drug discovery applications.

May

• Dr. Khetani received "The 2017 Teaching Award" from the UIC College of Engineering in "recognition of outstanding teaching contributions".
  
• Congratulations to Christine Lin for being lead author on a manuscript   published in Current Protocols in Toxicology focused on detailing the methods to create and utilize an advanced human liver model for predicting drug clearance and drug-drug interactions in humans.

April

• Congratulations to Brent Ware for being lead author on a manuscript published in Toxicological Sciences, focused on exploring the utility of global gene expression profiling for assessing the mechanisms of drug-induced liver injury in an engineered human liver co-culture model.
  

March

• The MTM lab is awarded an NIH R21 grant to explore, in collaboration with Dr. David Wood's Living Devices Lab at the University of Minnesota, the role of key microenvironmental factors on the functional maturation of induced pluripotent stem cell-derived human liver cells using a novel 3D microgel platform.
• Congratulations to Brent Ware for having his published article be among the top 10% of most downloaded articles in the journal (Toxicological Sciences) over the past two years (2015-2017).

2016

November

• Congratulations to Matthew Davidson for successfully defending his doctoral dissertation.
• Dr. Khetani is honored to be invited to review grant applications on four different study sections for the National Institutes of Health and  the National Science Foundation.
  

October

• Matt Davidson gave an oral talk at the Chicago Diabetes & Obesity Research Day held at UIC.
• David Kukla , Matt Davidson and Dr. Khetani  presented MTM research in the form of oral talks and poster presentations at the annual meeting of the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) in Minneapolis, MN.
  

September 

• Congratulations to Christine Lin for being lead author on a manuscript published in BioMed Research International, focused on reviewing advanced approaches for investigating drug-induced liver injury.
  
• Congratulations to Brent Ware for being lead author on a review article in Trends in Biotechnology, focused on surveying the recent engineered liver models for different phases of drug development.
  
• The MTM lab welcomes Mahboobeh Nabavinia as a research specialist.
  

August

• The MTM lab welcomes Grace Brown as a BS/MS student.
  
• Congratulations to Christine Lin for successfully passing her preliminary proposal exam.
  

July

• Congratulations to Brent Ware and Matthew Davidson for being co-authors on publications in ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces, focused on assessing cellular toxicity of nitric oxide releasing polymers and superhydrophobic coatings made with edible materials.
  

June

• The MTM lab welcomes Kai Huang as a PhD rotation student and John O'Brien as a BEST Program fellow for the summer.
  
• The MTM lab welcomes Chase Monckton from UNC-Chapel Hill as a doctoral student at UIC.
  

May

• Congratulations to Matt Davidson for being lead author on a publication in Scientific Reports, focused on assessing the effects of abnormal glucose levels on long-term functions of liver cells.
• Congratulations to Brent Ware for getting his chapter accepted in the book "Stem Cell-Derived Models in Toxicity".
  

March

• Congratulations to Matthew Davidson for successfully passing his preliminary proposal exam.

2015

September

• The MTM lab is fully functional in the Science and Engineering Laboratory East Building at UIC.
  

August

• The MTM lab moves from Colorado State University to University of Illinois at Chicago.