As the head of the Prince Polymer Materials Lab, Prince creates synthetic biomimetic hydrogels for biomedical uses. The hydrogels feature a nanofibrous structure with extensive pores for nutrition and waste transport, influencing mechanical characteristics and cell interaction.
Prince, a Professor at Waterloo’s Department of Chemical Engineering, used human-tissue mimic hydrogels to stimulate the development of small-scale tumor replicas made from donated tumor tissue.
She intends to evaluate the efficacy of cancer drugs on mini-tumour organoids before providing them to patients, potentially enabling tailored cancer therapy. This study was undertaken with Professor David Cescon at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre.
Prince's Waterloo research group is creating similar biomimetic hydrogels that will be injectable for the delivery of drugs and regenerative medical uses, as Waterloo researchers continue to lead Canadian health innovation.
Her study intends to employ injected filamentous hydrogel material to rebuild the heart tissue injured by a heart attack. She employed nanofibers as a framework to promote the renewal and repair of injured heart tissue.
Prince added, “We are building on the work that I started during my Ph.D. to design human-tissue mimetic hydrogels that can be injected into the human body to deliver therapeutics and repair the damage caused to the heart when a patient suffers a heart attack.”
Prince’s discovery is unusual since most gels currently employed in tissue engineering or 3D cell culture lacks this nanofibrous architecture. Prince’s group researches chemistry for nanostructures that precisely replicate human tissues and nanoparticles and polymers as material building blocks.
The next phase in Prince’s study will be to employ conductive nanoparticles to create electrically conductive nanofibrous gels capable of healing heart and skeletal muscle tissue.
Journal Reference:
Prince, E., et. al. (2024) Nanocolloidal hydrogel mimics the structure and nonlinear mechanical properties of biological fibrous networks. PNAS. doi:10.1073/pnas.2220755120.