Faglige nøgleord: Heart, disease, device, electronic, personalized medicine
Oplæg tilgængeligt på: Engelsk og italiensk
Heart diseases are the leading cause of death worldwide, but finding suitable treatments is not that easy. Conventional drugs are tested on animals even though the results may not be directly transferable to humans. To get around this, scientists have found a way to take some of the human patient cells, replicate them in the lab, and test the drug directly on them. However, the heart is tricky to study in the lab because of the electrical impulses that generate the beating. I am currently working on creating 3D-printed electronic devices for personalized heart medicine. The absolute goal is to create personalized devices to test the drugs with the cells of a patient. In this way, everybody would get the treatment they best deserve.
In the presentation, I will talk about broken hearts and the importance of studying heart diseases (e.g., arrhythmias). The presentation will be interactive, with the help of quizzes.
I am an Italian Ph.D. student in my second year. After attending a "scientific" high school, I enrolled in chemistry at university. I became passionate about studying materials and how to apply them to create useful tools for society. I then came across the DTU advertisement for a Ph.D. position for fabricating devices for studying heart diseases. I realized that by getting that position I could have applied the knowledge I have been studying to make a real contribution to the world. When I was a high schooler, I sometimes struggled to find the motivation to study certain topics because I simply didn´t know what real application they would have had. I would be really happy to help the students by giving them perspective on what they are studying.