[Seminar] Bioengineering of Cancer Stem Cells for Improved 3D Cell Models and Disease Modeling

Title: Bioengineering of Cancer Stem Cells for Improved 3D Cell Models and Disease Modeling

Speaker: Yonghyun (John) Kim, Ph.D. - Associate Professor, Chemical and Biological Engineering, The University of Alabama

Abstract: Cancer stem cells (CSCs), which are also called tumor-initiating cells, are considered the stem cell-like pluripotent cancer cells that cause relapse in patients even after aggressive and rigorous treatments. Pharmaceutical companies, however, typically use several decades-old cancer cell lines during their drug development, which lead to poor translation of results from the bench to clinic. More advanced 3D cell models and disease modeling is necessary. Therefore, our work aims to bridge the oncologists with the engineers by developing various bioengineering models that better
recapitulate patient tissues using CSCs. In this seminar, I will be discussing our laboratory’s recent efforts to develop CSC-based glioblastoma organoids as an alternative 3D cell model, as well as our efforts to develop fluid shear models to understand drug resistance in breast cancer metastasis.

Short CV: Dr. Yonghyun (John) Kim is an Associate Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University of Alabama (UA). He received his B.S. in Chemical Engineering and B.A. in Biochemistry from Lafayette College (Easton, Pennsylvania, USA) in 2002, and his Ph.D. in Chemical and Biochemical Engineering from the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC, Baltimore, Maryland, USA) in 2008. He then received his postdoctoral
training in oncology from Samsung Biomedical Research Institute (Seoul, South Korea) from 2008 to 2011, after which he joined UA in 2012 as an assistant professor. John was recognized as Outstanding Undergraduate Research Mentor (2016) and Outstanding Faculty Member (2019, 2020), inducted into the National Academy of Inventors (2019), and awarded the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award to Portugal (2022-2023). He currently serves as an executive committee member of the American Chemical Society Division of Biochemical Technology (BIOT), an editorial board member of Molecular Medicine Reports, he coordinates the department’s undergraduate curriculum, and is a co-director of Research Experience for Undergraduates Program focused on interdisciplinary engineering applications of polymers. He has over 60 peer-reviewed publications and received approximately $4M in external funding. John’s research is currently funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Department of Education, and the NIH.