Designing a synthetic peptide-based scaffold for in-vitro modelling of heart development

The design of synthetic and fully defined cell niches is key to the fundamental understanding of in-vitro models and their use without artefacts originating from the use of poorly defined animal-based products, whether to understand the developmental biology, or disease development or drugs toxicity. In this context the heart is one of the key organs on which researchers have focussed. The project aims to develop a tool, fully defined cell niche, for the building of a in-vitro heart development model exploiting recent advances in cardiac cell co-culture that will contribute to the delivery of World-Class Bioscience. In addition, the work will exploit recent advances in Industrial Biotechnology by exploiting the self-assembly and gelation properties on short de-novo designer peptide assembly.