Kevin E. Healy, Ph.D.

Although the genetic defects that lead to HCM are known, it has been difficult to understand how those mutations result in disease, in part because cells in a two-dimensional culture dish do not interact the same way cells in a three-dimensional organ do. Now, using the most advanced techniques in gene editing, stem cell generation, and three-dimensional cell culture, researchers from UC Berkeley and the Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco have for the first time developed a “microtissue” model of the heart in which they can study how common environmental stress affects normal and abnormal heart tissue.

The study, published in Nature Biomedical Engineering, was a collaboration between the labs of Kevin Healy, PhD, the Jan Fandrianto and Selfia Halim Distinguished Professor of Engineering in the Departments of Bioengineering and Materials Science & Engineering at UC Berkeley, and Bruce Conklin, MD, a senior investigator at the Gladstone Institutes and professor of medicine at UC San Francisco… Continue reading.

Bioengineering professors Kevin Healy and Luke Lee and collaborators have been awarded a two-year, $1.7 million boost to develop on-chip models of living human heart and liver tissue from the NIH. The grant is part of the Tissue Chip for Drug Screening program, an initiative to help predict the safety of drugs more quickly and cost-effectively, and thereby speed the development of effective therapeutics.

Bioengineering and Materials Science & Engineering Professor Kevin Healy was awarded the 2011 Clemson Award for Basic Research from the Society for Biomaterials.

Healy was honored for contributions to the basic knowledge and understanding of the interaction of materials with tissue, evidenced by significant research, important original publications in the literature and/or frequent reference to and reliance on this work by subsequent researchers.

The award was presented at the 2011 Society for Biomaterials annual meeting in Orlando, Florida.