Scientists 3D print human liver tissue in a lab and win top prizes in NASA challenge
Scientists have grown liver tissue capable of functioning for 30 days in the lab as part of NASA’s Vascular Tissue Challenge. In 2016 NASA put forth this competition to find teams that could ‘create thick, vascularised human organ tissue in an in-vitro environment to advance research and benefit medicine on long-duration missions and on Earth’. On 9 June the agency announced two winners of the challenge.
The teams, both made up of scientists from the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine (WFIRM) in North Carolina, won first and second place in the competition with different approaches to creating lab-grown human liver tissue.
The winning teams both used 3D-printing technologies to create their tissue. As dictated in the challenge rules, the teams had to keep their tissues ‘alive’ for 30-day trials. But to engineer tissue and have it ‘survive,’ the teams had to figure out how to move nutrients and oxygen through their creation and how to remove waste.
This process, known as perfusion, is done by blood vessels in organic, living tissues, but this is extremely tricky to replicate artificially. Using different materials and 3D-printed designs, the two teams each made different gel-like frameworks for their tissues that included channels that oxygen and nutrients could run through. The teams were able to get nutrients to flow through their artificial blood vessels without leaking.
The team that won first place, called team Winston, is the first team to complete its trial with the engineered tissue under the challenge rules and will receive $300,000 (£213,000) and the opportunity to further this work aboard the International Space Station.