Research summary
Discovering new treatments for diseases is an expensive and inefficient process. Complicating matters, it is also hard to predict who will benefit from specific drugs once they are ready for use. As Canada Research Chair in Tissue Engineering and Disease Modelling, Dr. Alison McGuigan’s vision is to enable more efficient and personalized drug discovery. She and her research team are doing this by designing, manufacturing and analyzing artificial tissues to accurately model healthy and diseased tissues in individuals.
McGuigan and her team are also developing marketable methods to bio-manufacture, perturb and analyze artificial tissues made from human tissues. Using these methods, they will decode how molecular signals between individual cells and their environments instruct cell function. Ultimately, their research will provide a basis for artificially programming cells for personalized treatments.