Education and Training
BSc in Biomedical Engineering, Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon, Portugal, 2016
BSc in Biomedical Engineering, Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon, Portugal, 2016
Autologous fat grafting has been used for more than 100 years for reconstruction or cosmetic reasons. However, the long-term retention of transplanted fat is quite variable, sometimes presenting low survival rates. One possible reason for this is that the cannulas used during liposuction or other plastic surgery interventions may be too aggressive for some cells, jeopardizing their viability and probably leading to their resorption once transplanted.
To understand the impact of different cannula’s sizes and different surgical techniques, I am isolating cells from lipoaspirates and characterizing them afterwards, using flow cytometry. Furthermore, cell culture has been performed for the different surgical conditions so as to assess whether it is possible to isolate mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) from each of them. The MSCs that have been isolated are also being studied using flow cytometry, multilineage differentiation assays, and colony forming unit - fibroblast assays.