Post doctoral/Research engineer position in esophageal tissue engineering using bioprinting techniques

Due to disease such as cancer or accidents such as caustic burns, the esophagus is sometimes irreversibly damaged and the only option is to remove it and replace it by using the stomach and part of the digestive tract, which often leads to serious complications and even in the best cases to poor functional results and poor quality of life. The most advanced current developments in tissue engineering for the esophagus is the use of decellularized donor tissue and clinical trials are ongoing at St Louis Hospital in this area. This approach however still presents some limitations, in particular related to donor shortage and inflammatory response. In order to prepare the next generation approach, the lab initiated a project funded by MSD Avenir to build an esophagus substitute using 3D printing. This bottom-up approach which uses bioinks as a starting material allows full control over 3D architecture and the construct can be thus personalized to the patient’s morphology and pathology, including smaller sizes for pediatric patients, in unlimited supply which is a great advantage over donor tissue. We have patented a formulation based on both natural and synthetic polymers which shows similar mechanical properties when compared to native esophagi, good suturability as well as high porosity to allow cell colonization. It also presents slow degradation as the ultimate aim is that it be replaced with native regenerated tissue over time.

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We are seeking a highly motivated and autonomous post-doctoral fellow or research engineer to continue this project and characterize long term culture on this scaffold by re-epithelializing the interior of the tube and seeding primary endothelial and muscular cells on the outer part. Characterizations will include both material mechanical testing and long term cell behavior, morphology and analysis of any toxicity.

Location; St Louis Hospital, Paris

Development of a cell analysis algorithm for phase microscopy imaging

At CEA-Leti we have validated a video-lens-free microscopy platform by performing thousands of hours of real-time imaging observing varied cell types and culture conditions (e.g.: primary cells, human stem cells, fibroblasts, endothelial cells, epithelial cells, 2D/3D cell culture, etc.). And we have developed different algorithms to study major cell functions, i.e. cell adhesion and spreading, cell division, cell division orientation, and cell death.
The research project is to extend the analysis of the datasets produced by lens-free video microscopy. The objective is to study a real-time cell tracking algorithm to follow every single cell and to plot different cell fate events as a function of time. To this aim, researches will be carried on segmentation and tracking algorithms that should outperform today’s state-of-the-art methodology in the field. In particular, the algorithms should yield good performances in terms of biological measures and practical usability. This will allow us to outperform today’s state-of-the-art methodology which are optimized for the intrinsic performances of the cell tracking and cell segmentation algorithms but fails at extracting important biological features (cell cycle duration, cell lineages, etc.). To this aim the recruited person should be able to develop a method that either take prior information into account using learning strategies (single vector machine, deep learning, etc.) or analyze cells in a global spatiotemporal video. We are looking people who have completed a PhD in image processing, with skills in the field of microscopy applied to biology.