Tenths of millions of people with organ failures or suffering from degenerative diseases are waiting for a novel cellular therapy or for a transplant of a donor compatible organ and the immense majority of these patients will die before receiving the tissue or organ they need. Despite the significant advances in tissue engineering, not a single artificial tissue has been used to replace a part of an organ, with the exception of simple or avascular tissues like skin or cartilage.
THOR proposes the development of a revolutionary tissue engineering technology, capable of producing any type of human tissue for organ repair or replacement in case of illness, trauma or degenerative diseases. Patient-tailored tissues will be fabricated by pools of bioinspired mini-robots in fully automated production plants, using the breakthrough incremental technologies of the THOR project:
- self-assembling molecules inspired to the extracellular matrix;
- self-assembling solid and hollow polymeric fibers;
- materials functionalization using photoactivable crosslinkers;
- cutting-edge mini robots to wave 3D self-assembling structures with factors and cells with micrometric precision.
THOR tissue arises from high-resolution 3D spatial positioning of self-assembling structures, angiogenic factors and relevant cell lineages, reprogrammed and expanded in a dedicated bioreactor under controlled conditions.
The overall objective is the construction of a functional piece of hippocampal tissue, a structure that is one of the most plastic regions in the mammalian brain. We aim at creating a precise organization of both neural fibres and vessels, a functioning blood-brain-barrier (BBB) on the microfluidic system with unprecedented life-time expectation.
Our long-term vision encompasses (1) the establishment of a Tissue Engineering industry for personalized organ repair, producing any type of well vascularized and fully functioning tissues and (2) the maintenance of such tissues alive for long periods of time, for an easy transportation to hospitals and clinics, even far from the big cities. THOR will foster the rise of a new industry and of a new biomedical field, while cadaveric donors' transplants will not be necessary.
