Haysam Ahmed is an experienced biomedical researcher with an ultimate goal of assisting the development of more effective and safer drug/cellular therapies that can be used to treat patients. Throughout his career, Haysam has worked on various projects all aimed at addressing issues with dire need for innovative solutions such as skin grafts for burn patients, a bio-aritificial liver for liver failure patients, and most recently a non-alcoholic fatty liver disease model that faithfully recapitulated key aspects of the disease and helped identify a drug combination that can potentially treat that disease which affect millions globally.

Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is currently the most common form of chronic liver disease and may progress towards NASH associated with liver fibrosis, cirrhosis, and hepatocellular carcinoma. Despite ongoing efforts, there is no effective therapeutic treatment available for NAFLD-NASH. This is partly due to an incomplete understanding of disease mechanisms, relevant biomarkers and predictive preclinical models for drug screening. We therefore developed a disease-mimicking in vitro model which closely resembles the pathophysiology of liver fibrosis induced by lifestyle. In addition, we introduced microfluidic flow to our cell model to investigate the effect of homeostatic tissue perfusion versus conventional static culture conditions.