Dr. Christina Chan Colloquia

Dr. Christina Chan graduated from Columbia with an undergraduate degree in chemical engineering. She went on to earn her doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania and do postdoc research at Massachusetts General Hospital before assuming her current position at Michigan State University. Dr. Chan is most interested in researching systems biology to better understand the pathways and mechanisms utilized in diseases and how they can be employed for therapeutic purposes. Dr. Chan explained at the beginning of her talk how there are two ways to go about treating diseases: a systems biology approaches or a tissue engineering approach. The talk was divided into two parts where she treated each of of these methods.

We were first presented with an application of systems biology, the correlation between saturated fats and diseases. Dr. Chan explained that with the technology we have now, we can take genes and predict the likelihood of diseases based on their identity. In Dr. Chan’s lab she uses both bottom-up and top-down methods to better understand the relationship between genetics and disease states. According to Dr. Chan, by the bottom-up approach, large amounts of data are processed and used to model predictive algorithms while the top-down approach involves “data mining.” This part of the talk was confusing because it seems that both of the descriptions are of the bottom-up approach and I would be curious to know what precisely Dr. Chan meant when she said top-down.

Dr. Chan also talked about the different effects of prestretched and unstretched surfaces when culturing cells. She explained that depending on the cell being cultured, one surface might yield more growth than the other. The difference was most pronounced in spinal cord regeneration where it was important that axons be made thicker than other cells. Dr. Chan found that when the cells were placed on a stretched surface, they aligned in such a way as to imitate protein (muscle) cells. A diagram similar to one that Dr. Chan showed during her presentation is shown above.

Dr. Chan’s research discussed in the colloquia, while interesting, had much to do with biomedical and computer science applications for a limited scope of cell culturing problems. I still can’t identify one main thread that would connect her talk to the field of chemical engineering. She works at the Chemical Engineering and Materials Science Department at Michigan State University so I would surmise that this falls under the latter subject and that her other projects account for her chemical engineering focus.

Overall, I think Dr. Chan’s research is significant and constitutes a new strategy for how to manipulate cell growth for optimal performance. Her examples given are substantial; in particular, I was impressed with the spinal cord regeneration anecdote. Dr. Chan realizes the practical applications of her work and goes so far as to prescribe a new way of thinking about systems biology and cell culturing. Far from being out of touch with the larger world of research, the questions Dr. Chan is investigating pair well with a paper written earlier this year on the same topic with mice.

Reference:

1. Arulmoli, Janahan. "Static Stretch Affects Neural Stem Cell Differentiation in an Extracellular Matrix-dependent Manner." Scientific Reports 5 (2015). Nature. Macmillan Publishers Limited. Web. 25 Nov. 2015.