Lonnie Shea is the Chair of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Michigan (U-M), which is joint between the College of Engineering and the School of Medicine.

Tissue engineered diagnostics

Tissue engineering has traditionally focused on restoring or replacing lost or damaged tissues. I will present our progress on engineering tissues as surrogates for natural tissues, which can be placed at readily accessible sites and biopsies to identify disease initiation or progression, and also the ability to monitor response to therapy. In metastatic breast cancer, the tissues to
simulate are those distal to the primary tumor, specifically solid organs that have the capacity to recruit metastatic cells based on aberrant inflammatory processes. The aberrant inflammation associated with disease progression transforms the typical foreign body response at an implant to create a metastatic niche. Inflammation within the microporous polymer implants is progressively altered by disease, with inflammation analogous to that in the diseased lung.

These differences were driven by select pro-tumor immune cell types that promote
immunosuppression and metastasis. Following therapy, longitudinal tracking of inflammation at the implant in individual mice differentiated resistance versus response to therapy. The
application of strategy to autoimmune disease will also be discussed. These results
demonstrate that the biological response at biomaterial implants is a platform for detecting
context-specific pathological states, which facilitates early detection of disease and therapeutic monitoring.