Research Interests

The McGuigan lab uses biomaterials and engineering technologies to create artificial tissues which can be used to develop and discover new drugs, decide which drugs to give to which patients, and potentially to predict which people are likely to get sick from specific diseases.

Artificial tissues for personalized medicine

Artificial tissues are emerging as a powerful tool for advancing personalized therapies for a broad range of diseases more efficiently. Unlike traditional 2-dimensional (2D) plastic surfaces for cell growth, artificial tissues offer a distinct advantage. Natural tissues are complex communities of cells organized within an equally complex extracellular matrix. 2D cultures fail to mimic this dynamic tissue environment, posing a challenge as cellular behavior is profoundly influenced by local surroundings. Moreover, many intricate cellular processes pertinent to regeneration and disease occur exclusively within 3D settings. Artificial tissues can be designed to recreate the necessary environmental signals to model and study complex cellular behaviours in a dish. The important environmental signals that that orchestrate cell function across stable, regenerating, or diseased tissues are complex, involve multiple cell populations over multiple spatial scales, and are not well understood. Further, it is not known which signals drive the observed heterogeneity in cell function in different people. The use of artificial tissue platforms for developing new therapies and for personalizing which therapies are given to which people is therefore still in its infancy.