Block by block: A LEGO-inspired approach to organ transplantation

South Dakota State University researcher Saikat Basu is collaborating on a potentially revolutionary biomedical engineering project to develop 3D-printed cubes that can be stacked together to replicate organs in the human body.

Around the world, hundreds of thousands of people are on waiting lists for replacement kidneys, livers, hearts, lungs and pancreases. In the U.S., over 100,000 people are on the national waiting list for organ transplantation, with the vast majority needing kidneys. The problem is availability. Organ demand far outpaces supply, and there are a number of associated challenges with organ transplantation, including organ preservation, immune rejection, and matching and compatibility.

A futuristic biomedical engineering research project is attempting to systematically reduce the world's organ transplantation problems. Researchers from Syracuse University, South Dakota State University and the State University of New York Upstate Medical University are collaborating to develop technology for the construction of organ-scale tissue grafts made from 3D-printed modular functional cube-units.

Pranav Soman, a biomedical and chemical engineering professor at Syracuse, is the primary investigator, and Saikat Basu, associate professor in SDSU's Jerome J. Lohr College of Engineering, is a co-primary investigator and will lead SDSU's portion of the project.

Bioprinting (3D printing using biomaterials and cells to create functional tissue-like structures) is presently being considered as a viable option for organ replacement. However, the complexities of the human body make bioprinting full human-scale organs challenging. Here, the team is utilizing smaller, bio printed cubes — made from extracellular matrix, a network of proteins, enzymes and other molecules that provide structural and biochemical support to surrounding cells — which can be assembled, in a LEGO-like fashion, to replicate an organ.

The initial focus of the project will be creating cubes that replicate bone tissue.

Soman's team will design and construct the cubes. Basu's team, with its nationally recognized expertise in fluid dynamics, will validate the cubes’ efficacy in organ replication by developing fluid dynamics models that simulate nutrient transport between the 3D-printed organ and the surrounding cells.

"We will optimize the LEGO-inspired cube design to prevent clogging at sharp corners, keep stress on the ECM within a cell-safe range, and ensure efficient diffusion for high cell viability," Basu said.

By establishing the feasibility of this technology to create a functional tissue graft, the resulting work could address many of the major challenges related to organ transplantation, including costs.

“This project could make on-demand and personalized large-size grafts for organ transplantations that will be broadly accessible and cost effective, compared to the scarcity and expense of human allograft tissues," Soman said in a Syracuse press release.

The project, titled "Building Blocks: LEGO-like assembly of perfusable ECM cubes to generate tissue-agnostic, suturable, organ-sized, viable and functional grafts," is backed by $2.26 million in funding through the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, an agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.