UC Irvine

Heart disease remains the number one cause of death in the world leading many researchers to pursue fundamental research in understanding heart structure, cardiac disease, and healing. But even as more research is performed, patient treatment options are still limited and do not fully restore heart function. To provide better treatment options to patients, researchers have focused on understanding the structure of the heart and its relationship to cardiac output. As a pump providing nutrients to the body, the heart’s structure is highly organized across multiple length scales ranging from the 3D organ, down to the force producing units inside cardiomyocytes, sarcomeres. Due to interactions between multiple, complex feedback mechanisms, understanding the structure-function relationship is not trivial. In this dissertation, we aimed to understand how perturbations such as structural changes and inflammatory cytokines affect force generated by cardiac tissue. By employing tools such as microcontact printing and muscular thin films, we were able to mimic 2D cardiac tissue structure and measure the force these tissues produced. Via the creation of novel tissues organized at different length scales, we began to determine whether the size of cellular organization affects the force these tissues can produce. We were also able to design experiments to determine the effect that inflammatory cytokines have on force production. Even with these advances, many mysteries remain, leaving decades of work to be done as heart disease becomes more prevalent due to an aging population. As a result, more scientists and engineers will be needed to take on research roles to provide better treatment options to patients. Therefore, to encourage a new generation of students, a high school tissue engineering summer program, CardioStart, was created in the hopes of inspiring students to pursue degrees in STEM. An in-person summer program was modified to create an online course with the aims to increase student access and engagement. While the in-person program included hands-on activities to supplement presentations, students learned the same material through the online platform overall knowledge at the end of the program was comparable. Furthermore, the online platform provided more accessibility to students with five-fold the enrollment rate over the in-person program. In the future, this program can be expanded by working with other researchers in different fields for students to further their knowledge. With this increased knowledge, more students would be interested in pursuing STEM and taking over research roles to further fundamental cardiac research. This would include further studies in understanding cardiac remodeling and incorporating more complexity back into the simplified systems used in this dissertation.