Milos Marinkovic, PhD

Dr. Marinkovic’s scientific background focuses on the interplay between cells and their microenvironment, or biological niche. A major theme of his work involves utilizing extracellular matrices in order to generate tissue-specific microenvironments ex vivo. By contrasting extracellular matrices produced from bone marrow and adipose-derived stromal cells, his work has demonstrated that even relatively closely related cell types produce unique extracellular matrices. This work has helped establish that matrices produced ex vivo retain physiologically relevant cues of their respective tissues of origin. Using this rationale, Dr. Marinkovic is exploiting matrices produced by young versus elderly bone marrow-derived stromal cells to explore aging-related changes in the bone marrow implicated in degenerative disease. Aside from their use in investigating cell-matrix interactions, these tissue-specific niches have the potential to serve as cell manufacturing and disease-modeling microenvironments, as well as tools for drug discovery and testing. Dr. Marinkovic’s research also encompasses the interactions of stem cells and immune cells with nanoscale materials such as nanoparticles and self-assembled monolayers, both as method of modeling physiological niches and exploiting transport phenomena for intracellular delivery of biomolecules.

He is an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at University of Texas Health at San Antonio and consults for several biotechnology companies.

Dr. Marinkovic received a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry from the University of Texas at Austin and a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from University of Texas Health at San Antonio.