News

This summer, we were delighted to once again be able to host a Summer Undergraduate Cancer Research Experience (SUCRE) summer research student. Shawn Sutherland is an undergraduate student at Syracuse University, and spent this summer working closely with graduate student Kapil Thapa to learn how to characterize microvascular density in tumor samples obtained from mouse and human. His work with us was recently highlighted by the Tulane Cancer Center on their social media. To capstone his summer research experience, Shawn successfully presented his work at the Louisiana Cancer Research Center’s SUCRE poster session!

We are delighted to announce that our latest review paper — “Capturing physiological hemodynamic flow and mechanosensitive cell signaling in vessel-on-a-chip platforms” — has just been published at Frontiers in Physiology, as part of the special Research Topic “Mechanotransduction in Vascular Development and Disease“.

In this paper — which is a collaboration between our lab and the lab of Dr. Mark Mondrinos in Tulane Dept. of Biomedical Engineering — we review mechanosensitive signaling in the vasculature, and then explore strategies and challenges for incorporating physiological hemodynamic flow in vessel-on-a-chip microphysiological systems.

The Fang Lab is excited to announce that we have been awarded a Research Competitiveness Subprogram (RCS) award from the Louisiana Board of Regents to study the role of connexins in Hereditary Hemorrhagic Telangiectasia! We are very excited to receive support from the State of Louisiana to pursue this work!

Congratulations to our graduate student Kapil Thapa for  receiving an Honorable Mention award for his poster presented at the Tulane Research, Innovation and Creativity Summit (TRICS) meeting two weeks ago! Kapil was one of two Fang lab graduate students to present at TRICS, and his poster focused on his project studying the role of endothelial-to-mesenchymal transition in healthy and tumor-associated angiogenesis.

We are delighted to announce that we have been selected to present our recent retina-on-a-chip work at the 2024 MPS World Summit, being held June 10-June 14, 2024 in Seattle, Washington. We hope to see you there!

We are excited to announce our lab’s first primary research article — Cx40 Suppresses Sprouting Angiogenesis In Vitro — is now available online ahead of print at Bioelectricity! 

Tulane University News reports that the school has received $5 million in funds to build a state-of-the-art nanofabrication clean room that will significantly advance organ-on-a-chip research and other research and engineering applications at the school. 

We are excited to announce that our lab is now affiliated with the Louisiana Cancer Research Center. We are looking forward to this incredible opportunity to building many fruitful collaborations with incredible cancer biologists from across Louisiana.

We are grateful to the Eye, Ear, Nose and Throat Foundation for awarding our lab and the Mondrinos Lab (Biomedical Engineering) a competitive multi-year research grant to develop new organ-on-a-chip tissue models.