We are delighted to announce our next Insigneo Seminar will be a hybrid event with Dr. Famaey, Soft Tissue Biomechanics group leader and FIBEr core facility coordinator in the Mechanical Engineering Department – Biomechanics section at KU Leuven, Belgium, presenting on ‘The Role of Mechanics in Biological Soft Tissue Disease & Treatment: Improving the Ross procedure’ on Friday 10 December 2021. Insigneo Members please check your calendar invitations for online joining details, to request an invitation please contact info@insigneo.org. In Person venue: Alfred Denny Conference Room, Alfred Denny Building.

Biosketch:

Dr. Famaey received the MSc and PhD degree in mechanical engineering at KU Leuven, Belgium, in 2006 and 2012, respectively. Her PhD on the biomechanics of soft tissue overload prevention in surgery included a seven months research visit to Stanford University in Prof. Ellen Kuhl’s Computational Biomechanics lab as a Fulbright scholar. From 2012-2019, she held a postdoctoral fellowship from the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO), which included several extended research visits to Ecole Des Mines de Saint Etienne in the group of Prof. Stéphane Avril.

Since 2018, she is a tenure track research professor at the Department of Mechanical Engineering, KU Leuven. There, she heads the Soft Tissue Biomechanics Group, currently counting 3 postdocs, 9 PhD and several master thesis students. Since 2018, she also holds a visiting professorship at the University of Ghent in the BioMMeda group. Since 2017, she is the coordinator of FIBEr (KU Leuven core facility for biomechanical experimentation), a center with a unique portfolio of equipment for the mechanical characterization of a wide range of biological tissues. She is also leading the C4Bio initiative, an international Community Challenge towards Consensus on Characterization of Biological Tissue.

The overall aim of her research is to develop optimal solutions for biological soft tissue injury prevention (e.g. helmets), soft tissue injury repair (e.g. through surgical treatment) and soft tissue replacement (e.g. vascular grafts). This requires developments in nonlinear finite element modeling, mechanobiologically inspired constitutive models and experimental characterization of material properties of soft biological tissue.

Title: The Role of Mechanics in Biological Soft Tissue Disease & Treatment: Improving the Ross procedure
The Ross procedure is a surgical procedure in which a diseased aortic valve is replaced by the person’s own pulmonary valve. It is the only aortic valve substitute than can restore long-term survival and quality of life. It also presents a fascinating mechanobiological scenario in which the pulmonary autograft is assumed to have the innate potential to remodel into an aortic phenotype once exposed to systemic pressure conditions. However, one of the main pitfalls of the procedure is dilatation of the autograft wall due to a vicious cycle of maladaptation. We present a combined in vivo, in vitro and in silico approach to study this phenomenon. Through a combination of clinical studies, animal trials, microstructural and mechanical analysis, RNA sequencing and computational growth- and remodeling techniques, our aim is to unravel the autograft remodeling process, with the ultimate aim to optimize the surgical procedure and improve its long-term outcome.