미세조직공학 및 나노의학 연구실

Organoids are three-dimensional, self-organizing cellular systems that reproduce key structural, functional, and molecular features of human tissues, while organ-on-a-chip reconstructs dynamic tissue microenvironments, including extracellular matrices, fluid flow, mechanical cues, and multicellular interactions. By integrating organoids, organ-on-a-chip, and biomaterials approaches, we develop human-relevant platforms to uncover disease mechanisms and accelerate translational research. Aging is a major underlying risk factor for numerous chronic and degenerative diseases. Rather than treating individual age-associated diseases independently, emerging strategies seek to understand and control the fundamental biological processes of aging and ultimately develop interventions that restore tissue function and promote rejuvenation. However, human aging is particularly difficult to study experimentally. Animal models often fail to reproduce human-specific aging phenotypes because of interspecies differences, while conventional in vitro models cannot capture the progressive interactions among cellular dysfunction, tissue microenvironmental changes, vascular and immune alterations, and inter-organ communication that collectively drive systemic aging. Cancer remains difficult to treat not only because of its genetic complexity but also because every patient's tumor exists within a distinct biological microenvironment. Patient-derived tumor organoids preserve many genetic and phenotypic characteristics of individual tumors and have emerged as powerful tools for personalized drug testing. However, conventional tumor organoids primarily reproduce the cancer cells themselves and cannot fully reconstruct the tumor microenvironment (TME), including extracellular matrix, stromal and im