Archives for the ‘project progress’ Category

phase one

We have completed the work on the Heart Project for 2021, although our collaboration with the UTS Cardiovascular Regeneration Group is continuing and we’ll continue to update this blog. At this point we want to again acknowledge the support of Dr Carmine Gentile and his laboratory team at UTS, as well as the generous financial […]

bioprinting

Pleased to be able to undertake more experiments in the lab, after lockdown restrictions eased. We aim to produce a series of sculptures, to contain live cells embedded in hydrogel (alginate gelatin). We are documenting the lab work, aiming to produce short time-lapse films of the process. Here is a trial run…  

A Big Week

It started Monday 13 September with international despatch from Wisconsin USA of 8 vials of human heart cells – 40 million cells in all. By Wednesday they’d reached the FedEx depot at Matraville in Sydney’s south east. But they were stuck in Customs. On Friday nothing had changed – except most likely the dry ice […]

Science Week Seminar next Monday

We’ve been excitedly preparing for next Monday’s presentation for Science Week and Sydney Science Trail. Our collaborator Carmine Gentile from the UTS Cardiovascular Regeneration Lab is leading a webinar titled “Science in Focus: Mending Broken Hearts with Cells and Bioprinting Technology”; and we are presenting an introduction to our project. It’s coming right up… Monday […]

lockdown – more lockdown

We’ve continued our online meetings with Dr. Carmine Gentile and the team. Today we were able to speak with a cardio thoracic surgeon for his perspective on this new research into cultivation and 3D printing of heart tissue. He showed us a Russian copy of History of the Heart – a book with imagery of […]

lockdown – meetings

Our lab adventure has been cut short by lockdown. We have changed tack & are having a series of one to one zoom meetings with each member of the team to find out more about their research projects. Each discussion so far has opened out whole worlds of fascinating detail and complexity: surgical considerations and […]

getting up to speed

We’re meeting at UTS – a week for setting things up, ironing out admin and devising a schedule for the next 4 months We’ve begun consultation with a couple of the researchers in the Cardiovascular Regeneration lab, tuning into the activities of the team. Their research for a paper is underway looking at the challenges […]

beginning

We are starting our Synapse residency with the Cardiovascular Regeneration Group  at the UTS School of Biomedical Engineering. Dr Carmine Gentile and team, cultivate heart cells that are used in 3D live tissue printing to research and test the repair of damaged hearts. https://www.gentilelab.com/