EBRAHIMKHANI LAB

To make a new organ or repair a damaged one, billions of your cells come together, make collective decisions, self-organize in space and time without a central control.  How do cellular communities decide (compute) when and where to change fate, assemble, communicate, and self-organize? How are the tissue-level behaviors (i.e., shape, function) embedded at different scales (i.e., cells and their communication circuits)? Importantly, can we build and engineer scripts or programs (in the form of, i.e., genetic circuits) to build or re-direct these processes at different scales? Answering these questions, enable new frameworks to combat diseases, innovate new therapies, build human organs and understand the principle of our own development. However, it has broader impacts beyond biology & medicine. 

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We build to understand! Our research integrates systems and synthetic biology methods to synthetically program stem cell morphogenesis across the natural or fully new developmental trajectories and towards multicellular systems such as organoids or new models of embryogenesis. We model human development in vitro, develop technologies to control those processes and decode principle of our own tissue development and regeneration. 

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Our studies will generate designer organoids, novel tissues, and synthetic niches critical for 
(a) understanding human development and disease states (b) regenerative therapies (c) drug discoveries. Our vision is to advance regenerative medicine through integrating systems and synthetic biology ; inspired by ecological principles exist across the nature..

Key words: Synthetic Niches, Human Organoids, Designer Tissues, Engineering Morphogenesis, Endoderm, Liver, Blood, Synthetic Biology, Systems Biology, Cellular Ecology