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SBME: Dr. Sarah Hedtrich
February 27, 2020 @ 10:00 am - 11:00 am
The School of Biomedical Engineering presents a seminar:
Dr. Sarah Hedtrich
Assistant Professor
Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences
UBC
Date: Thursday, February 27, 2020
Time: 10:00 AM
Location: Biomedical Research Centre, BRC 351
Title: Complex tissue models to study inflammatory and genetic diseases of human epithelia
Abstract: Patients all over the world hope to be treated with the most effective and safest drugs. The costs to develop one new drug are calculated with $2.6 billion and increase by 8.5% annually. The rise in expenditures on R&D is disproportional to the number of newly approved drugs. Up to 90% of potential therapeutics fail in clinical trials, which represents the translational crisis we are currently facing. Before entering clinical trials, drug candidates must demonstrate efficacy and safety – data which are mainly derived from animal testing. Animal models, particularly rodents, are considered the gold standard for preclinical research and as such, have been beyond discussion for decades. Over the past years, however, evidence has been accumulated to show that distinct interspecies-related differences between animals and humans account for a major proportion of the translational gap. Many human diseases do not naturally occur in other animals, requiring in some cases artificial disease induction in animals to model the disease. Even if animals do show similar disease phenotypes, it remains unclear if the underlying pathogenesis is comparable or identical to that in humans. Hence, aiming to improve the translation from bench-to-bedside, the development of complex human-based tissue models gained increasing interest over the past decade. In this talk, I will present the work of my lab on the tissue engineering of normal and diseased models of human epithelia with a focus on inflammatory and genetic diseases and their application in basic and preclinical research.
Bio: Dr. Hedtrich specializes in nanotechnologies, structural tissue engineering/biomaterials, inflammatory respiratory diseases and skin. Her research interests include novel therapies for inflammatory and genetic diseases of human epithelia; tissue regeneration and wound healing; topical drug delivery and nanomedicine; new biomedical approaches and alternatives to animal testing.
