Anatomy & Physiology: Current Research
Open Access

Mani T. Valarmathi

Biography

Dr. Valarmathi M. Thiruvanamalai received his B.Sc. in Chemistry, M.B.B.S. in Medicine & Surgery and M.D. in Pathology from the University of Madras, Madras, India as well as Ph.D. in Medical Biotechnology from All-India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi, India. He was appointed as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pathology in SRMC & RI (Deemed University), affiliated to Harvard Medical International, Madras, India. He received a Visiting Scientist Fellowship from the National Institute of Health (NIH) and spent two years with Dr. Ira Pastan in the Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB). He joined the Department of Comparative Biosciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in 2013 after working as a Research Assistant Professor at the University of South Carolina (USC) in Columbia, South Carolina. In UIUC, he is conducting his cardiovascular physiology teaching and cardiovascular research in College of Medicine, College of Veterinary Medicine and the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. His past research experience includes human cancer genetics. He is serving as a member in various national and international scientific societies and organizations such as ISSCR, TERMIS, AACR, ASIP, ACS, ESC and AHA. Currently, his research focuses mainly on creating functioning vascularized tissue-engineered constructs for cardiovascular repair and regeneration.

Research Interest

Dr. Thiruvanamalai is tackling one of the most fundamental problems facing cardiac therapy, creating a vascularized cardiac muscle construct. Cardiovascular disease is a leading cause of significant morbidity and mortality in the United States and Worldwide. Restricted myocardial regeneration after tissue injury and shortage of organs for transplantation are the principal constraints of conventional therapies. To this end, Dr. Thiruvanamalai is in the process of developing an in vitro vascularized cardiac myocyte constructs using autologous and/or allogenic, adult stem cells (BMSCs/MSCs) in 3-D biomimetic scaffold, which can be used as a cardiac patch for repairing various types of cardiac lesions. Currently, his research work focuses on tissue-engineering approach to the generation of various functional vascularized tissue using the adult multipotent stem cells (BMSCs/MSCs) and/or the pluripotent stem cells in various engineered 3-D scaffolds in a form suitable for surgical implantation for repairing various types of tissue defects in regenerative capacity. The clinical and industrial implications of these developed 3-D vascularized tissues are enormous and not limited for repair/regeneration of the cardiovascular structures. Also there is a need for such 3-D tissue models for the study of basic biological mechanisms that are underpinning the orderly cellular differentiation and tissue morphogenesis. Moreover, the use of these 3-D constructs in drug discovery and toxicity screening is hard to place value on. In a nutshell, Dr. Thiruvanamalai’s research is state-of-the-art that promises to lead to the generation of total replacement biologic products for various therapeutic purposes in regenerative medicine.

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