Dr. Moran Yadid

Moran Yadid seeks to leverage the regenerative capacity of the human body to benefit patients and improve lives. Her PhD at Technion–Israel Institute of Technology in Biomedical Engineering aimed to explain some of the feedback loops within the cardiac sarcomere, the basic contractile unit of the heart muscle, providing insights into muscle contraction and cardiac function in the normal as well as in the failing, dyskinetic heart.

Dr. Yadid worked with several biomedical startup companies in developing techniques for monitoring breathing, automating microscopy, and treating solid tumors.

At Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and the Wyss Institute, with funding from the US government, Dr. Yadid helped develop a heart-on-chip platform. The goal of a heart-on-chip (like other organs-on-chips) is to circumvent the costly process of drug development, and personalize it, by replacing animal testing with cells derived from a specific patient that are integrated with mechanical and electrical sensors in order to build a patient specific heart on a chip composed of contractile human myocardium.

At the Azrieli Faculty of Medicine at Bar-Ilan University, Dr. Yadid’s lab investigates the novel roles of extracellular vesicles, or EVs, which are secreted from endothelial cells, in maintaining tissue homeostasis and modulating their metabolism and stress response in health and in disease. How do diseases associated with endothelial dysfunction, such as diabetes, obesity, and neurodegenerative disease, affect the putative protective functions of the endothelium? Dr. Yadid hopes to apply her bioengineering skills to translate her discoveries into biomimetic therapeutics for major surgery, strokes, acute kidney injury, and organ transplantation.