University of Virginia assistant engineering professor Liheng Cai has earned the Maximizing Investigator's Research Award from the National Institutes of Health. His work holds significant implications for the future of personalized biomedicine, including the possibility of repairing living tissue, perhaps even replacing whole organs. The NIH honor, bestowed by its National Institute of General Medical Sciences, signals its support for researchers performing breakthrough research.
The associated grant will infuse his lab at the UVA School of Engineering and Applied Science with $1.9 million over the next five years. The grant will allow Cai to further his study of tissue repair and disease progression through the advanced living cellular structures his team in the Soft Biomatter Lab creates.
Cai holds a joint appointment in the Departments of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering, and a courtesy appointment in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. For now, the structures exist outside of the human body. But the lab will continue to improve upon how the structures mimic human biology.
One of Cai's major aspirations is to someday integrate healthy, bio-printed cells into the human body. "One of the major components of the award is to develop biomaterials that can be constructed from tiny, basic modules," said Cai, who joined the UVA Engineering faculty in 2018. "The mechanical properties of the modules will mimic the mechanical properties of human tissu.