On-demand bioprinted kidneys could help address organ donor shortages

Rice University bioengineer Antonios Mikos is part of a team of researchers led by the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, which was awarded up to $24.8 million over five years to help address the US’s growing organ donor shortage by bioprinting on-demand kidney tissues.

The new funding, from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), will enable the team to produce bioprinted, vascularised kidney tissue that augments renal function in patients suffering from kidney disease.

The implantable kidney tissue will be made from a patient’s own cells combined with a bioink that supports the long-term viability of the implanted cells.
 
“Our key efforts are going to focus on the development of the bioinks, which are 3D printable inks that can host cells,” said Vasiliki Kolliopoulos, a postdoctoral researcher in the Mikos lab who is working on the project.

“These are highly complex materials that have to not only be able to mimic the tissue microenvironment, but that can also sustain cells over their culture period prior to them being implanted.”

The task will involve developing a library of bioinks that can be adapted to different patients and also vascularising the 3D-printed constructs to enable their long-term maintenance and function in the body.

The project will draw on the Mikos group’s extensive experience in the development of bioinks, including tissue-mimicking bioinks, and will benefit from the resources and infrastructure at the Biomaterials Lab at Rice.

The funding comes from the Personalized Regenerative Immunocompetent Nanotechnology Tissue (PRINT) programme at ARPA-H, an agency within the US Department of Health and Human Services.

PRINT will use state-of-the-art bioprinting technology and a regenerative medicine approach to 3D-print personalised, on-demand human organs that do not require immunosuppressive drugs.

This aims to solve the critical problems of organ shortage and transplantation risks in the United States. There are 120,000 people on waiting lists for an organ, but only 45,000 transplants are performed annually.

In addition, transplanted organs last about 15 to 23 years on average and require immunosuppressive drugs for life.

“Just as tissue engineering is considered a convergent science that requires the convergence of many different disciplines, ARPA-H funding mechanisms like PRINT allow for the convergence of different laboratories, different institutions that contribute different expertise needed to address a major health care problem ? in this case, kidney disease,” said Mikos, the Louis Calder Professor of Bioengineering and Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.

“We’re really excited to take part in such a significant project and to be able to contribute towards the next generation of patient care,” Kolliopoulos said.

The project also includes plans to develop a scalable pathway for the manufacturing and commercialisation of personalised bioprinted organs and tissues.

“What we are trying to do with PRINT is extraordinarily hard,” said ARPA-H PRINT programme manager Ryan Spitler.

“It requires major breakthroughs in cell manufacturing, bioreactor design and 3D-printing technology to reliably build organs that function like the real thing.

“But if we succeed, we won’t just be giving patients faster access to new organs – we will change the foundation of transplantation itself.

“The advances from this programme could dramatically reduce wait times, eliminate the need for lifelong immunosuppressive drugs and open the door to bioprinted solutions for many other organs in the future.”