In this presentation I will provide an overview of the work in our lab. We are interested in clinically-inspired basic and translational research at the intersection between bioengineering and biomedicine. We aim to understand the role of the biophysical and biochemical microenvironment, in particular the physico-chemical properties of tissues, extracellular matrix and collective of cells, in controlling tissue regeneration, cancer dormancy and bone metastasis. We use materials science and engineering systems, such as scaffolds, hydrogels or microfluidic chips, which obtain inspiration from in vivo imaging and ex vivo multimodal characterization at different length scales.