 So in the field of tissue engineering, as we continue to design increasingly complex biomaterials, one of the new frontiers we really need to address better is how do we improve biotransport, getting the correct amount of nutrients and oxygen into these three-dimensional materials in order to support the cells. One of the primary ways of doing this inside the body is to drive angiogenesis, or production of new blood vessels. And one of the ways that we've worked on this as a field has been using large exogenous doses of growth factors such as VEGF. However, the project that we're talking about right now is one where we started to explore alternative strategies to try to induce the production of new blood vessels in fully three-dimensional biomaterials. The endometrium, or the lining of the uterus, represents a really interesting model tissue for understanding tissue engineering because of the cyclic periods of growth and regeneration that we see. As it is shed and resorbed every menstrual cycle, there are periods of proliferation and then periods of secretion and differentiation that happen, you know, up to 400 times in a woman's life. And so it's been a really understudied tissue, particularly within tissue engineering. And so what we've been really enjoying about this project is that creating endometrially inspired tissues represents a really great first step towards studying female reproductive tissues and female reproductive biology more broadly within engineering. So in this paper we explore whether endometrial cues can be used to drive an early angiogenic-like response within a three-dimensional culture, specifically in a glycosamin glycane scaffold. So we're taking endometrial epithelial cells or ishikawas and trying to induce a behavior change within a non-endometrial endothelial cell line. We also look at whether exogenous estradiol can improve this angiogenic signaling between the epithelial cell and the endothelial cell through VEGF production.