3D Bioprinting Laboratory creating state-of-the-art platform for studying disease progression and facilitating drug discovery
Mohammad Fazle Alam, PhD, became a research scientist at the University of Illinois College of Medicine Rockford Department of Biomedical Sciences in March 2023. He is in charge of the Blazer Foundation-funded 3D bioprinting lab where he uses 3D printing technology to make complex tissue structures and formulate new bio-inks for future-generation 3D bioprinting.
After completing his doctorate, Dr. Alam worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Fudan University in Shanghai, China. His research primarily focused on cutting-edge technologies such as 3D bioprinting, stem-cell-based tissue engineering and modeling diseases. His research aimed to find new ways to use 3D printing to create functional tissues and organs. He also worked on using lab-on-a-chip technology to model heart diseases such as myocardial infarction and thoracic aortic aneurysms. For his research, he got a postdoc fellowship from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and a Road and Belt Fellowship from the Shanghai Government.
Dr. Alam is establishing a new lab at UICOMR focusing on regenerative tissue engineering, with primary research on 3D bioprinting and stem-cell-based vascular tissue engineering for disease modeling. He already started a variety of research projects including:
- Developing an engineered bio-ink or smart biomaterial by incorporating dynamic covalent bonds that have tunable mechanical properties that match with native tissue that allow to printing of functional tissue. This research holds significant promise for applications in regenerative medicine, personalized healthcare and drug testing platforms.
- Creating an on-chip model of cardiac hypertrophy disease using advanced technology such as stem cell reprogramming, microfluidics and 3D bioprinting. The focus is to understand the role of mitochondrial dynamics in this disease and develop personalized medicine and drug discovery platforms for future drug candidates.
- Studying the advancement of cancer in prostate and lung cancer by creating a specialized platform for growing cancer organoids utilizing biomaterials and 3D bioprinting. This platform will allow researchers to simulate the primary and secondary locations (metastasis sites) of the cancer.
Dr. Alam has published more than 30 research articles in high-impact factor journals like elife, Biosensors and Bioelectronics, ACS Applied Materials and Biointerface, Analytical Chemistry and Langmuir, with more than 600 citations. He also works as a review editor for the Frontiers journals Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine, Comparative Immunology and Cellular and Molecular Mechanisms of Brain-aging.