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Grant Award

Jingyan Han, PhD, Awarded American Heart Association Transformational Project Award

Jingyan Han, PhD, associate professor of medicine at Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine, has received a three-year, $300,000 American Heart Association (AHA) Transformational Project Award. The award will enable her to use 3D printing to create and study artificial blood vessels to improve the understanding of vascular biology. This project will be done in collaboration with Yonghui Ding, PhD, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

Endothelial cell (EC) and vascular smooth muscle cell (VSMC) alignment is critical for stable vascular equilibrium, regulating barrier integrity, vascular tone and mechanical stability. In arteries, ECs align with blood flow to optimize shear stress responses such as blood flow, while VSMCs align circumferentially to control vessel compliance. Disrupted alignment contributes to endothelial dysfunction, vascular remodeling and atherosclerosis. While shear stress-induced EC alignment is well studied, it remains unclear whether cell alignment alone—independent of hemodynamic forces—can regulate vascular function and enhance disease resistance.

Han’s project will investigate how changes in the physical arrangement or features of a surface influences vascular function using 3D-printed scaffolds that mimic human vascular tissue with dual micro-topographies, enabling simultaneous EC and VSMC alignment.

By using cell alignment as a key determinant of vascular function, Han believes this study will provide new insights into EC-VSMC coordination, mechanotransduction—(mechanical energy is converted into electrical and/or biochemical signals) and disease resistance, establishing a novel framework for vascular mechanobiology (how cells and tissues respond to and generate mechanical forces) beyond traditional shear stress models.

“This innovative platform—developed through a successful collaboration between vascular biologists and bioengineers—mimics native vessel architecture with unprecedented fidelity, opening new frontiers for studying vascular biology and accelerating high-throughput drug screening for cardiovascular diseases,” says Han.

Han’s research involves the molecular mechanisms of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease with a particular focus on the role of redox signaling (the cellular communication process involving the reversible oxidation and reduction of molecules) in vascular endothelial cell dysfunction in response to various risk factors including hyperlipidemia, aging and chronic alcohol abuse.

Han recently received another multiple PI award – a four-year, $3.1M R01 award from the National Institutes of Health’s National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute to further the understanding of aortic aneurysms for her project, “Thiol redox signaling in aortic aneurysm.” Han received her BA and MS from Peking University in China and her PhD from the University of Illinois.

The AHA’s Transformational Project Award supports highly innovative, high-impact projects that build on work in progress that could ultimately lead to critical discoveries or major advancements that will accelerate the field of cardiovascular and/or cerebrovascular research.