Yimu Zhao

Yimu Zhao is a staff scientist at the Acceleration Consortium. Her primary research interest is the recapitulation of the organ-specific microenvironment and the promotion of functional maturation through organoid and organ-on-a-chip systems. Her postdoctoral research focused on the construction of organ-specific vascular networks and multi-organ systems for studying drug testing and disease phenotypes across multiple tissue types. She received her Ph.D. in 2019 supervised by Dr. Milica Radisic at the University of Toronto. During her doctoral studies, she designed and developed the Biowire II Organ-on-a-Chip platform, a drug-inert tissue culture and testing platform that utilizes super-elastic biomaterials as biosensors and cultivates 3D adult-like cardiac tissue arrays. This technology amalgamates principles from developmental biology, tissue engineering, and microfluidics, thereby enabling the cultivation of multiple tissue models, including adult-like chamber-specific healthy and patient-specific diseased cardiac tissues. The platform is compatible with pharmaceutical industry practices and can provide continuous functional readouts through material-based biosensors. Dr. Zhao is a co-founder of TARA, which is founded based on the Biowire II technology and was acquired by Valo Health in 2022. She has published 40+ peer-reviewed high-impact journal articles and four patents, including a first-author paper published and highlighted in Cell.