Arindom Sen, PhD

Dr. Sen's current research interests lie in the areas of biochemical and biomedical engineering. His primary research program focuses on making contributions to the development of adult stem cell based therapies by combining principles from the biological sciences, engineering, and medicine. Stem cells are unspecialized cells that have the ability to divide and generate the different specialized cell types that provide the functional capabilities of a particular tissue. This awesome regenerative capacity means that stem cells hold promise as therapeutic agents in the treatment of those medical conditions that result from the death of specialized cells within a tissue. The replacement of the dead cells with fully functional specialized cells, an approach known as cell based therapy, may be able to reverse these medical conditions. However, stem cells are only present in adult tissues in very sparse quantities, and as such, cannot simply be harvested in clinically relevant numbers. Thus, if stem cell therapy is to achieve widespread clinical significance, standard methods will need to be developed to expand stem cell populations in culture, and then to induce these generated stem cells populations towards desired specialized cell types and tissues.

Dr. Sen is working on developing bioreactor based generation systems to scale-up the production of a wide array of stem cell types including neural, pancreatic, hepatic, cardiac, adipose, and mesenchymal stem cells. He is also investigating how physical, chemical and mechanical cues can be used to induce stem cells to become clinically useful specialized cells including those which can be used to repair bone and joint injuries, and reverse neurodegenerative conditions such as Parkinson’s disease.