Mohamadamin Forouzandehmehr, MSc has done ground-breaking work in translating the behavior of laboratory-grown heart-like cells results into patient relevance in his PhD work. More precisely, Forouzandehmehr developed computer models of the beating behavior of iPSC-derived cardiomyocytes and created predictions of how patients’ cardiomyocytes would behave in the same situation. The goal was to provide robust and accurate computational tools for fast pre-clinical drug screening.
Isolating heart cells from the patient for studying them in the laboratory is rarely done due to the high risk for the patient. Hence, induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) technology is routinely used for creating cardiac-like cells from the easily accessible cells, for instance, blood cells, of the patient. Even though iPSC-derived heart cells recapitulate many aspects of mature human heart cells, they have not fully matured adult human heart cells in laboratory conditions. Computer modeling aims to bridge the gap between the laboratory and human physiology.
Forouzandehmehr works in the Computational Biophysics & Imaging Group lead by Jari Hyttinen. Follow his PhD defense onsite or online on Friday 16 February 2024 more details here.