“These tiny liver models can help us learn more about sickness and ways to make people better.”
When Quinton Smith started helping out at the Children’s Hospital in Albuquerque, New Mexico, he soon realized that being a doctor wasn’t the right job for him.
At that time, Quinton Smith was a student at the university. Seeing the kids who were not feeling well made him really sad. But then he had an idea, ‘Maybe I can use science to help them.
Quinton Smith decided to study chemical engineering because he thought it was a cool way to become a doctor. Even though he ended up working in a lab instead of with sick people directly, he still really cares about finding ways to make sick people feel better.
Quinton Smith now has a lab at the University of California, Irvine. In his lab, he uses special tools that are usually used to make really small electronic things. But instead, he uses them to create tiny organs that are grown in the lab and act like the ones inside our bodies. Normally, scientists look at cells in a flat dish, but that’s not how they naturally are. By getting cells to form these 3-D structures called organoids, scientists like Quinton have a better way to understand diseases and try out different ways to help sick people.
Scientists are doing something really cool by using both fancy tech from Silicon Valley and the study of special cells called stem cells. They are now creating tissues that act and work just like human tissues,” says Smith. “This is something new and hasn’t been done before.
The power of stem cells.
Quinton Smith started his work by looking at things in two dimensions. When he was a student, he spent two summers working with a scientist named Sharon Gerecht at Johns Hopkins University. He was trying to create a device that could control how oxygen and liquid move in tiny spaces on flat silicon wafers. The idea was to make a place that’s like where blood vessels form in our bodies. That’s when Quinton started to really like something called ‘human induced pluripotent stem cells.
These special cells, called stem cells, are made from regular body cells that are changed back to a very early stage, kind of like when a baby is growing inside its mom. These cells can then become any type of cell in the body. Quinton Smith says, ‘It was amazing to learn that you can take these cells and make them into anything you want.
Quinton Smith went back to work with Sharon Gerecht for his Ph.D. He wanted to understand how special signals from the environment can help these stem cells turn into blood vessels. He used a cool method called micropatterning, where scientists put proteins on glass slides to help cells stick to them. With this method, he got the cells to arrange and start forming artificial blood vessels. Depending on the pattern, the cells made shapes like stars, circles, or triangles. It showed how cells can work together to create tube-like structures, just like real blood vessels.
When Quinton Smith was learning more after his Ph.D. at MIT, he started looking at things in 3-D, especially at tiny liver models.
Just like how blood vessels branch out in our bodies, there is also a network of tiny tubes in the liver that carry a special liquid called bile acid. This liquid helps our bodies break down and use fat. But when we make artificial liver tissue in the lab, it doesn’t always make these tubes that branch out like they do in our bodies. Quinton Smith explains, ‘The cells in the lab need a little bit of help to do it right.
To solve this issue, Quinton Smith and his team do something clever. They put tiny acupuncture needles in a stiff gel to make small channels. Once the gel becomes hard, they put special cells inside and use chemical signals to guide them in making those tubes. Quinton says, ‘We can make bile ducts whenever we need them by using a smart engineering method.
Quinton Smith can make these tiny liver models because he understands both biology and engineering, says Sangeeta Bhatia, a scientist who helped him when he was learning more after his Ph.D. at MIT. Quinton knows a lot about how cells work, and he can use cool engineering tricks to figure out how different types of cells organize and work together in our bodies.
Quinton Smith’s lab is doing something really cool now. They use a special technique called 3-D printing to make sure that the liver tissues they grow in the lab, like blood vessels and bile ducts, organize the right way. This way, they can study and figure out the main reasons behind some liver problems, like fatty liver disease, says Smith. By looking at tiny liver models made from cells of healthy people and those from people with liver problems, they might find out what’s causing these issues, especially in Hispanic people who are more likely to be affected.
Looking beyond the liver.
Quinton Smith doesn’t only focus on the liver. He and the people he’s teaching are looking into different body parts and sicknesses too.
One thing they’re studying is a sickness called preeclampsia. It happens to pregnant women, especially African American women. When a woman has preeclampsia, her blood pressure gets really high because the placenta is swollen and squeezing her blood vessels. Quinton wants to check tiny placenta models in the lab to understand how things like pushing and special signals from the placenta affect the mom’s blood vessels.
Quinton Smith says, “We’re super happy about this research. Not long ago, scientists figured out how to make stem cells go back to an earlier stage so they can become placentas. The placentas we make in the lab even release a hormone called human chorionic gonadotropin, which is what makes a pregnancy test show a positive result.
Quinton Smith.
