Ngan Huang

Ngan F. Huang, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery, Stanford University School of Medicine

Research Description: Dr. Huang’s research program has made important contributions in understanding how extracellular microenvironment modulates endothelial cell behavior, in order to translate these basic insights towards cardiovascular tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. Endothelial cell biology and pathology is important to diabetes research, including studies of diabetes complications. She has developed innovative biomaterials and technology for enhancing the survival and angiogenesis of endothelial cells derived from induced pluripotent stem cells. Since the success of tissue engineering is dependent on the functionality of patient-derived stem cells, she also studies stem cells derived from patients (i.e., those with metabolic disorders like diabetes or peripheral arterial disease) to determine the functionality of the stem cells once they are differentiated into endothelial cells. Dr. Huang’s laboratory collaborates with SDRC members to characterize the functionality of endothelial cells derived from induced pluripotent stem cells from patients with insulin resistance, pre-diabetes or diabetes.

Selected relevant publications (Stanford DRC members in BOLD):

  1. Huang NF, Chaudhuri O, Cahan P, Wang A, Engler AJ, Wang Y, Kumar S, Khademhosseini A, Li S. Multi-scale cellular engineering: From molecules to organ-on-a-chip. APL Bioeng. 2020 Mar 3;4(1):010906. doi: 10.1063/1.5129788. PMID: 32161833; PMCID: PMC7054123. 

  2. Wanjare M, Kawamura M, Hu C, Alcazar C, Wang H, Woo YJ, Huang NF. Vascularization of Engineered Spatially Patterned Myocardial Tissue Derived From Human Pluripotent Stem Cells in vivo. Front Bioeng Biotechnol. 2019 Sep 3;7:208. doi: 10.3389/fbioe.2019.00208. PMID: 31552234; PMCID: PMC6733921. 

  3. Huang NF, Serpooshan V, Morris VB, Sayed N, Pardon G, Abilez OJ, Nakayama KH, Pruitt BL, Wu SM, Yoon YS, Zhang J, Wu JC. Big bottlenecks in cardiovascular tissue engineering. Commun Biol. 2018 Nov 21;1:199. doi: 10.1038/s42003-018-0202-8. PMID: 30480100; PMCID: PMC6249300. 

  4. Carcamo-Orive I, Huang NF, Quertermous T, Knowles JW. Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell-Derived Endothelial Cells in Insulin Resistance and Metabolic Syndrome. Arterioscler Thromb Vasc Biol. 2017 Nov;37(11):2038-2042. doi: 10.1161/ATVBAHA.117.309291. PMID: 28729365; PMCID: PMC5669062.