09/15/2025
By Danielle Fretwell

The Francis College of Engineering, Department of Biomedical Engineering, invites you to attend a Doctoral Dissertation Proposal defense by Nazli Seray Bostanci on: "Comparison of 2D and 3D Inflammatory Nociception Models and Evaluation of Sex-dependent Differences Using Human Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell Sensory Cultures on Microelectrode Arrays."

Candidate Name: Nazli Seray Bostanci
Degree: Doctoral
Defense Date: Wednesday, Sept. 24, 2025
Time: 11 a.m.-noon
Location: Zoom. Please contact the advisor for the link.

Committee:

  • Advisor: Bryan J. Black, Assistant Professor, Biomedical Engineering, University of Massachusetts Lowell
  • Chiara Ghezzi, Associate Professor, Biomedical Engineering, University of Massachusetts Lowell
  • Jeffrey Moore, Professor, Biological Sciences, University of Massachusetts Lowell
  • Carlo Saverio Iorio, Ph.D., Universite Libre de Bruxelles
  • Peter Gaines, Ph.D., Biological Sciences, University of Massachusetts Lowell

Abstract:
Chronic pain is the nation’s leading public health crisis, affecting over 20% of the US population, with significant sex-dependent differences in chronic pain rates, types, and severity. Regardless, chronic pain reduces the length and quality of life, causing physical, emotional, mental, and economic stress. Chronic pain management primarily relies on pharmaceuticals, yet they remain limited, ineffective, and are often problematic for both sexes (e.g., the opioid epidemic). Therefore, deeper fundamental understanding of the sex-dependent differences observed in clinical presentation and therapeutic outcomes as well as new pharmaceutical approaches are urgently needed. However, due to chronic pain’s inherent mechanistic complexity, it is a poor candidate for classical target-based drug discovery. This has led researchers to seek a mechanism-agnostic, phenotypic compound screening approach. The Pain Research Lab (PRL) at UMass Lowell has recently developed a phenotypic model of inflammatory nociception based on 2D co-cultures of human induced pluripotent stem cell (hiPSC) sensory neurons (SNs) and glia on microelectrode arrays (MEAs). Although our 2D model successfully confirms cherry-picked compounds, 3D models may provide a more physiologically relevant microenvironment that supports cell–cell and cell–matrix interactions, thereby enabling better recapitulation of phenotypic responses (i.e. compound efficacy and toxicity). However, to our knowledge, no human cell-based 3D model of inflammatory nociception has been demonstrated, nor do current models adequately address the well-documented sex-dependent differences in drug responsiveness. Therefore, developing biologically relevant models that capture these differences is of critical importance for more effective, targeted compound screening. The goal of this proposal is to develop, optimize and compare sex- and hormone- dependent 2D and 3D chronic inflammatory nociception models that can be used for analgesic compound screening.