Project description
Novel bioengineered vascularisation for 'plug and play' transplants
The capillary beds are a fundamental part of the circulatory system that transports oxygen and nutrients to cells and tissues and carries away harmful waste. Without them, the blood would circle around the body like a cargo train that never stops at the stations for pickup and delivery. Much progress has been made on 'building' tissues and organs for transplant, but inducing essential vascularisation in a way that such tissues and organs are viable after transplantation, is still challenging. The EU-funded CapBed project will develop bioengineered capillary beds able to induce vascularisation in lab-made organs, allowing them to be connected to the patient's blood supply upon transplantation, ensuring the new organs get off to a healthy start.
Objective
The demand for donated organs vastly outnumbers the supply, leading each year to the death of thousands of people and the suffering of millions more. Engineered tissues and organs following Tissue Engineering approaches are a possible solution to this problem. However, a prevascularization solution to irrigate complex engineered tissues and assure their survival after transplantation is currently elusive. In the human body, complex organs and tissues irrigation is achieved by a network of blood vessels termed capillary bed which suggests such a structure is needed in engineered tissues. Previous approaches to engineer capillary beds reached different levels of success but none yielded a fully functional one due to the inability in simultaneously addressing key elements such as correct angiogenic cell populations, a suitable matrix and dynamic conditions that mimic blood flow.
CapBed aims at proposing a new technology to fabricate in vitro capillary beds that include a vascular axis that can be anastomosed with a patient circulation. Such capillary beds could be used as prime tools to prevascularize in vitro engineered tissues and provide fast perfusion of those after transplantation to a patient. Cutting edge techniques will be for the first time integrated in a disruptive approach to address the requirements listed above. Angiogenic cell sheets of human Adipose-derived Stromal Vascular fraction cells will provide the cell populations that integrate the capillaries and manage its intricate formation, as well as the collagen required to build the matrix that will hold the capillary beds. Innovative fabrication technologies such as 3D printing and laser photoablation will be used for the fabrication of the micropatterned matrix that will allow fluid flow through microfluidics. The resulting functional capillary beds can be used with virtually every tissue engineering strategy rendering the proposed strategy with massive economical, scientific and medical potential
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
- natural sciencesphysical sciencesclassical mechanicsfluid mechanicsmicrofluidics
- engineering and technologycivil engineeringwater engineeringirrigation
- medical and health sciencesmedical biotechnologytissue engineering
- medical and health sciencesclinical medicinetransplantation
- natural sciencesphysical sciencesopticslaser physics
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Funding Scheme
ERC-STG - Starting GrantHost institution
4704 553 Braga
Portugal