Alex Lammers

Boston University | BU · Department of Biomedical Engineering

Natural tissues are composed of diverse cells and extracellular materials whose arrangements across several length scales—from subcellular lengths¹ (micrometre) to the organ scale² (centimetre)—regulate biological functions. Tissue-fabrication methods have progressed to large constructs, for example, through stereolithography³ and nozzle-based biop...

The Notch pathway regulates complex patterning events in many species and is critical for the proper formation and function of the vasculature. Despite this importance, how the various components of the Notch pathway work in concert is still not well understood. For example, NOTCH1 stabilizes homotypic endothelial junctions, but the role of NOTCH1...

By observing the activity of anti-cancer agents directly in tumors, there is potential to greatly expand our understanding of drug response and develop more personalized cancer treatments. Implantable microdevices (IMD) have been recently developed to deliver microdoses of chemotherapeutic agents locally into confined regions of live tumors; the ti...

Formation of capillary blood vasculature is a critical requirement for native as well as engineered organs and can be induced in vitro by coculturing endothelial cells with fibroblasts. However, whether these fibroblasts are required only in the initial morphogenesis of endothelial cells or needed throughout is unknown, and the ability to remove th...

Purpose Recently developed implantable microdevices can perform multi‐drug response assessment of cancer drugs in‐vivo, with potential to develop highly optimized personalized cancer treatment strategies. However, minimally invasive/interventional image‐guided methods of in‐vivo microdevice implantation, securement, and retrieval are needed for bro...

We describe a label-free approach based on Raman spectroscopy, to study drug-induced apoptosis in vivo. Spectral-shifts at wavenumbers associated with DNA, proteins, lipids, and collagen have been identified on breast...

Mammalian tissues rely on a variety of nutrients to support their physiological functions. It is known that altered metabolism is involved in the pathogenesis of cancer, but which nutrients support the inappropriate growth of intact malignant tumors is incompletely understood. Amino acids are essential nutrients for many cancer cells that can be ob...