PhD at Queen Mary University: Unravelling mechanisms of drug-induced myocarditis using human cardiovascular-chip models integrated with immune cells

The 4-year PhD project aims to address an important and challenging knowledge gap concerning new therapeutic modalities, such as monoclonal antibodies and cell therapies, that can potentially induce cardiac toxicity in the clinic (i.e., inflammatory cardiomyopathy and myocarditis). To better understand mechanisms underlying immune-mediated cardiotoxicity, there is a significant need to develop human-relevant microphysiological systems to model drug-mediated immune responses in the heart. The successful candidate will receive first-class training from the Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) supervisors at the state-of-the-art biofabrication lab to assemble microvascularised cardiac tissues in microfluidic chips. In addition, the student will receive training by supervisors at AstraZeneca (Cambridge, UK), and will gain expertise in building immune-competent models for drug safety applications. Importantly, the supervisory team have complementary expertise to train the PhD student to tackle the intellectual challenges in the project.