Cellular Mechanics and Respiratory Bioengineering Laboratory

Geoffrey N. Maksym, Ph.D.
Associate Professor

I am actively seeking new students with backgrounds in any of the following areas:

• Biomedical Engineering
• Electrical Engineering
• Mechanical Engineering
• Physics

• Biology
• Physiology
• Pharmacology
• Biochemistry and Molecular Biology

Students in my lab use advanced engineering, physics and biological approaches to understand and combat asthma.

We conduct projects ranging from measure cell function at the nanoscale to developing new medical devices for research and commercialization.

My research is basic, in that it is focussed at understanding how forces alter cell function, and it is also applied, in that we direct our efforts to improve the health of patients with asthma.

Asthma affects over 2 million people in Canada and is the leading cause of hospital admissions in children under the age of 12.

Mechanotransduction:

To undertake this work we are examining a more basic behaviour of all cells: The ability of cells to alter their structure and function in response to mechanical deformation. The ability of a cell to respond and alter its response to mechanical stimulation is essential to blood pressure regulation, bone growth, wound healing, muscle growth, and its malfunction is increasingly implicated in many diseases including osteoporosis, cancer, muscular dystrophy, and asthma. 

We use cellular imaging and genetic manipulation methods to explore these questions, and work internationally with collaborators in Boston, Reno, Barcelona Spain and Erlangen Germany.

Medical Devices Development and Research:

We are also engaged in collaboration with physicians at the QEII and a medical device company in Montreal. We are also developing methods for measuring airway health and function in patients, both in children and adults. This exciting project is under patent application and is supported by Dalhousie's Technology transfer office and NSERC idea to innovation program. We are developing advanced signal analysis methods including time-frequency and wavelet analysis and advanced instrumentation technologies.

Asthma and Airway Smooth Muscle Function

In our lab, we apply the specific engineering tools that we have developed to measure the contractile behaviour of cultured smooth muscle cells. Using these tools we can measure differences in mechanical function between different cell populations. We investigate the how the cell structure leads to changes in cell function.

The technology developed by our research team (Dalhousie-Harvard-Barcelona) opens up several new avenues of investigation for the roles of forces at the cellular level. In addition to understanding smooth muscle cell mechanics, we are investigating how cells respond to applied forces. The internal structure of the cell, the cytoskeleton adapts to both internal and external forces, altereing its shape, rigidity and connections continuously. These changes alter how cells contract, migrate and invade tissues. In particular these changes occur in organ dysfunction, including smooth muslce hyperplasia and in asthma enhanced airway contractility.

We use tools from engineering to moleculat biology and genetic manipulation to better understand cell mechanics and its changes in health and disease.

Scanning Electron microscopy image of a ferrimagnetic bead attached to a human airway smooth muscle cell.

Bead on square cell responding to oscillatory magnetic field.