{"id":15235,"date":"2020-05-08T16:49:18","date_gmt":"2020-05-08T20:49:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/textiles.ncsu.edu\/news\/?p=15235"},"modified":"2024-05-13T09:35:57","modified_gmt":"2024-05-13T13:35:57","slug":"heart-maker-meet-new-tecs-assistant-professor-jessica-gluck","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/textiles.ncsu.edu\/news\/2020\/05\/heart-maker-meet-new-tecs-assistant-professor-jessica-gluck\/","title":{"rendered":"Heart Maker: Meet New TECS Assistant Professor Jessica Gluck"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n\n\n

Written by Cameron Walker<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Photo: TECS Associate Professor Jessica Gluck working in her laboratory<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What if you could create a new heart from a patient\u2019s own cells, eliminating problems such as long waits for organ donors and the possibility of organ rejection? New Textile Engineering, Chemistry and Science (TECS<\/a>) assistant professor Jessica Gluck<\/a> believes it\u2019s possible, and her cutting-edge research brings us ever-closer to the prospect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gluck\u2019s research takes place at the cellular level — specifically, stem cells. Most cells in the body have a specific function; stem cells are cells that have not yet been assigned a purpose, and therefore can become almost any cell the body needs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI’m really interested in tissue engineering; we want to recreate something that you would [normally] find in the body, but in the lab,\u201d she said. \u201cWe want to try to figure out how [stem cells] become a tissue of interest, because if we know how they become, how they develop, we can figure out when a disease or a disorder will happen. We can come up with either a way to completely prevent it from happening or a new treatment strategy. On the flip side, if we can recreate that tissue from stem cells, [take it] through development and get to the point where it’s functioning, we could potentially replace that diseased tissue as a way to negate organ donation.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The stem cells she uses in her research are called induced pluripotent stem cells, which are skin cells that have been stripped of their purpose and returned to what is basically their embryonic state.  A scientist named Shinya Yamanaka won the Nobel Peace Prize for this research in 2012, toward the end of Gluck\u2019s doctoral studies, opening up a new frontier in biological research.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAn induced pluripotent stem cell has all of the same properties of an embryonic stem cell, but it could potentially become patient-specific,\u201d she said. \u201cIf you had a problem, we could take your cells and reprogram them — essentially tricking them into thinking that they’re back in that embryonic state — and then put them back into you. So they would be specific to you. Then the tissue that you would eventually be regenerating could be specifically tailored to you.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So where do the textiles come in?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThink of it like getting eggs from chickens,\u201d she said. \u201cIt’s not like you’re just carrying all the eggs back [in your hands]; you need something to put them in. We need some sort of scaffold material to put this tissue on so that we could then [insert it] surgically right where we need it. So we are working with nanofibrous scaffolds; we can alter their properties mechanically and physically, so we can add proteins that you would find in the body that would be specific to that area.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For example, the area that would most frequently need to be replaced in a heart is the pacemaker — the conductor of the heart\u2019s rhythm section.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n