Benjamin A. Juliar

TL;DR: Alginate, a minimally supportive hydrogel with no inherent cell instructive properties, supports HIO growth in vitro and leads to HIO epithelial differentiation that is virtually indistinguishable from Matrigel-grown HIOs.

TL;DR: These findings, especially the large spatiotemporal variations in local stiffness around cells during morphogenesis in soft 3D fibrin gels, underscore that characterizing ECM mechanics across length scales provides an opportunity to attain a deeper mechanobiological understanding of the microenvironment's roles in cell fate and tissue patterning.

TL;DR: An acoustically-responsive scaffold (ARS) is developed, whereby release of a growth factor is non-invasively and spatiotemporally controlled in an on-demand manner using focused ultrasound, and how controlled release of bFGF can stimulate endothelial network formation is demonstrated.

TL;DR: How cells alter tissue-level mechanical properties during capillary morphogenesis using a model of endothelial-stromal cell co-culture within PEG based hydrogels is reported, demonstrating that matrix metalloproteinase (MMP)-mediated remodeling is required for stiffening to occur.

TL;DR: Findings highlight the critical importance of M MP-mediated degradation during vasculogenesis and provide strong evidence to justify the preferential selection of MMP-degradable peptide crosslinkers in synthetic hydrogels used to study vascular morphogenesis and promote vascularization.