Dr. Brandon Tefft sees an opportunity to narrow the gap between treatment and cure for cardiovascular diseases. Today, patients with these diseases are treated with cutting-edge implants and devices made from various artificial biomaterials such as metals, ceramics and more. These treatments serve patients well, but Tefft, associate professor in the Marquette University and Medical College of Wisconsin Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering, wants to raise expectations of what a treatment can do for a patient. Instead of using materials that are unnatural to the human body and that often require replacement over time, Tefft is working toward one-time solutions that leverage a patient’s natural healing and regenerative responses.
“Rather than implanting a device and hoping the body’s natural processes leave it alone, we are working toward treatments that interact with the body and are replaced by natural healthy tissue,” Tefft says. “The paradigm shift is that it could be a lasting cure. It’s a one-time intervention and you’re done.”
Leading the Cardiovascular Regenerative Engineering Laboratory (CaRE Lab) at the Medical College of Wisconsin, Tefft is focused on living-tissue replacements that can become native to a patient’s body and even grow with them as they age. The promise of a heart valve implant growing over time is particularly valuable for pediatric patients, many of whom undergo repeat surgeries throughout childhood for replacement valves to match their latest growth stage. In a new project supported by the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) CAREER program, Tefft is developing a one-time valve implant to serve the tens of thousands of infants born each year in the United States with congenital heart disease.
For this project, Tefft is developing a biomaterial that folds to create a durable valve scaffold, ready to be integrated with umbilical cord blood cells to form a living tissue valve in place of the initial scaffold. These blood cells are made possible by Dr. Joy Lincoln and Donna Mahnke, collaborators at the Herma Heart Institute of Children’s Wisconsin. Integrating umbilical cord blood cells would allow for tissue to develop in the same natural way it would in a human embryo. As the scaffold degrades, the new tissue will remain with the patient and grow throughout childhood. In addition to eliminating the need for invasive follow up surgeries, it could also reduce the amount secondary treatments and medications that are typically needed to manage the body’s response to an artificial implant.
An opportunity for broader impact
The NSF’s CAREER program is a competitive funding source designed to empower promising junior faculty in STEM to pursue game changing ideas and solutions.
“This CAREER award represents an affirmation of Dr. Brandon Tefft’s ability to lead change in the fields of biomedical engineering and healthcare,” says Dr. Kristina Ropella, Opus Dean of the Opus College of Engineering at Marquette. “Dr. Tefft is a true innovator, fueled by a vision that medical treatments can always be improved, and patient care can always be transformed for better outcomes.”
Recognizing the impact faculty members achieve in both their research and their educational duties, the CAREER program encourages faculty to develop new educational experiences and resources alongside their research pursuits. Tefft sees this as an opportunity to change mindsets of future college students regarding their potential to become STEM professionals. “Specifically for engineering, many students do not get much exposure to it before college. It’s important to expose students to engineering through extracurricular programs early so they know what it is and consider it as a major and a career,” he says.
Origami-inspired transformations
As his lab aims to create a folding scaffold structure that can transform into a living valve, Tefft is eager to help middle school and high school students recognize their own potential to transform into future STEM innovators.
To achieve this, Tefft is turning to origami, the Japanese art of paper folding, as a unique entry point to start a conversation with students about STEM. The hands-on experience of folding paper into a new physical form is not far from what Tefft’s team is doing in their advanced tissue engineering work. As Tefft and his team began conceptualizing the scaffold structure, they noticed it had an origami-like appearance with carefully folded layers.
Tefft plans to host a variety of origami-inspired STEM workshops with schools in the Milwaukee community. His goal is to reframe students’ perceptions of STEM and help them recognize that their natural creativity and curiosity are key talents to become future engineers or scientists.
These workshops will be supported by Marquette’s chapters of Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) and Society of Women Engineers (SWE), two student organizations that are already volunteering with local schools for hands-on STEM activities and mentoring. Tefft sees Marquette’s undergraduate engineering students as the perfect partner for this work, both from their existing enthusiasm to serve the community and their ability to share their own experiences and stories.
Bringing the next generation into the fold
Tefft’s educational vision extends beyond inspiring future engineering students. He sees the potential of current students to be a part of the solution immediately. For each objective of the pediatric heart valve project, Tefft has a student leading hands-on work. Aleksandra Zielonka, a doctoral student, is developing a new biomaterial that will serve as the initial scaffold implant. Joshua Oswald, an undergraduate student, is investigating the cellular processes needed to spark the body’s regeneration of new tissue. And Rohith Kumar, a high school student participating in a pre-college research program, is helping fold the biomaterial into heart valve prostheses and testing their performance.
As Tefft’s team focuses on delivering a strong proof-of-concept and prototype that could eventually develop into real patient trials, he is excited to have curious and passionate students engaged in the process. He knows that current and future students will be the ones to push this early technology further in the decades ahead, continuing the tradition of pursuing cures and serving patients in previously impossible ways.
“It’s a self-sustaining system with every generation of engineers and scientists that are trained,” Tefft says.
