Cynthia Reinhart-King wants to improve our understanding of tissue formation.
Her work with the endothelium, the tissue that lines blood vessels, might someday lead to treatments for hardening of the arteries, or a better cardiovascular stent, but she remains focused on the basic research that will serve as a platform for such advances.
“With a product, it either works or it doesn’t, but there’s almost always something to be gained from basic science, whether it works or not,” she says. “For me, it’s more satisfying, more fulfilling.”
Once considered no more than a passive conduit for blood, the endothelium is now known to play an active role in the healthy functioning of the cardiovascular system. When the endothelium becomes inflamed by cholesterol and fat, arteries harden—a condition known as atherosclerosis that is the leading cause of strokes, heart attacks, and various heart diseases.
“It’s alarming the rate of death and morbidity from cardiovascular disease. It’s definitely a compelling thing to study,” says Reinhart-King. “The real mission is prevention because you save a ton of money if you can prevent the disease before it occurs.”
Reinhart-King’s research examines how endothelial cells grow and adhere to blood vessels and how they respond to mechanical and chemical cues. Mechanical cues, such as reduced blood flow, can induce chemical signals in endothelial cells, causing them to change shape and become vulnerable to inflammatory molecules. Reduced blood flow is associated with hardened arteries, but the exact relationship is unclear.
By making the first measurements of the force exerted by the endothelium on underlying tissue in response to such cues, Reinhart-King’s research is shedding more light on the subject. “It’s almost a chicken and egg problem. Our research is trying to find out if hardening can be both a cause and an effect,” says Reinhart-King. “At UPenn, my labmates and I showed that in cancer cells, mechanical signals can actually promote cancer progression, or create a positive loop that enhances malignancy. I’m operating on the hypothesis that we don’t know everything we need to know about how the mechanical operation of the blood vessel affects its function and disease progression.”
Studying tissue formation in animals is problematic because of complicated cause and effect mechanisms, and one-dimensional stiff tissue cultures grown in the lab aren’t very realistic, so Reinhart-King is working to develop more realistic tissue scaffolds. “We can test cell behavior in these,” she says. “It’s a bench-top model that mimics a human body and human disease progression.”
Reinhart-King credits her career path to an undergraduate research opportunity she had as a sophomore and she is looking forward to sharing her passion in the same way with Cornell students. “I got into biomedical engineering basically because of really good mentoring I had as an undergraduate,” she says. “When you work with people who love what they do it’s easy to love what you do as well.”
Prof. Reinhart-King's Web site
