Jin Zhou, Ph.D.
Professor, Institute of Military Cognition and Brain Sciences,
Academy of Military Medical Sciences
sisun819@yahoo.com
Biography: Prof. Jin Zhou is a researcher at Institute of Military Cognition and Brain Sciences of the Academy of Military Medical Sciences and a Team Leader of Biological Interdisciplinary Department. She is the recipient of the China National Funds for Distinguished Young Scientists and Beijing NOVA Program. She obtained Young Scientist Project of the Key Program of the National Key Research and Development Program of China Stem Cell and Transformation Research. She also is standing member of China Society of Mechanical Engineering Biological Manufacturing Engineering branch.
She is mainly engaged in research related to tissue engineering and neuro engineering. As the project leader, she has undertaken a number of national and local projects, received more than 40 million yuan funding. She has published 49 SCI papers and received 9 national invention patents. Among them, the following achievements were obtained in myocardial tissue engineering research: (1) The first use of carbon-based conductive nanomaterials to construct cardiac patch, significantly improved the effect of myocardial infarction repair, and revealed the regulation mechanism of conductive nanomaterials in myocardial remodeling and regenerative repair; (2) The use of injectable tissue engineering strategy to achieve the regeneration of the new nanomaterial binding factor or brown fat heart stem; (3) Development Non-therapeutic application studies of engineered myocardial tissue in vitro, and reveal that the cardiac scaffold tissue-specific microenvironment has the ability to induce differentiation/transdifferentiation of iPSCs and NSCs into cardiovascular lineage cells.
Topic title: Nanomaterials for Cardiac Tissues Construction and Therapy of Myocardial Infarction
Abstract: The Engineered cardiac tissues (ECTs) showed great prospect on heart function after implantation and offers new perspectives for the therapy of myocardial infarction (MI). In previous studies, several materials have been used and encouraging results have been achieved in the field, however, the therapeutic efficacy in general is restricted to inhibiting further pathological deterioration of infarct myocardium due to the insufficient structural and electrical support of conventional materials. Recently, carbon nanotubes have been at the forefront of nanotechnology due to their unique electrical and mechanical properties, which is together with other types of conductive nanomaterial have been used to regulate spontaneous electrophysiological activity, maturation of cultured cardiomyocytes in vitro. Here we developed several types of carbon nanotubes composite scaffolds and investigated their potential in cardiac tissues construction and therapy of myocardial infarction. We found that carbon nanotubes as well as grapheme composite materials could provide cellular microenvironment in vitro favorable for cardiac contraction and the expression of electrochemical associated proteins respectively. When used as carrier for intra-myocardial delivery of ECTs after myocardial infarction, the conductive nanomaterials significantly enhanced the engraftment of ECTs in infarct myocardium and augmented their therapeutic efficacies in myocardial infarction (MI). The data provided a further step on the therapeutic application of ECTs in myocardial infarction by using electronical conductive nanomaterial and offered a new perspective in development electronical conductive nanomaterial in cardiac tissue engineering.