Aishwarya Pawar and team awarded $1M in NSF funding for VAScTWIN project
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Author: Cyclone Engineering
Award Winner: Aishwarya Pawar
Award Title: VAScTWIN: Multiscale Digital Twin for Predictive Modeling and Genetic Control of Cardiac Vascular Regeneration
Award Category: Project Funding Award
Award Description: Among cardiovascular diseases, ischemic heart disease remains a leading cause of mortality worldwide. While revascularization shows promise as an effective therapeutic method, the large patient variability in genetics, comorbidities, and response to growth factors increases the complexity of standardized regenerative therapies. This project focuses on developing a novel digital twin of blood vessel growth after cardiac injury, based on genetic information and live imaging data. This will make it possible to reverse engineer the precise genetic interventions needed to produce the desired vasculature, as well as to safely test and improve gene-editing techniques in silico. The project’s integration of mathematics, gene editing, and computational modeling will help train a new generation of scientists at the nexus of mathematics and medicine. This project develops a novel multiscale digital twin framework to predict and control blood vessel growth by integrating molecular signaling dynamics, cellular migration behavior, sprouting patterns, and tissue-level growth and remodeling.
Co-PIs: Ratul Chowdhury, Rana Parshad, Jeffrey Essner
Funding Source: NSF
Award Amount: $1,000,000