On June 10th, NASA announced the top two winning teams of its Vascular Organization Challenge. The first and second teams will receive 300,000 US dollars and 100,000 US dollars respectively. The results of the first team will also have the opportunity to be on the International Space Station. Advance research.
Participants of the Vascular Tissue Challenge must produce vascularized tissue more than 1 cm thick and maintain more than 85% cell survival within a 30-day period. Vascularized tissue is a complex tissue that contains a variety of cells. The entire tissue needs blood vessels to integrate with the organs. The purpose of the challenge is to accelerate bioengineering innovation and provide assistance to mankind and future space explorers.
The two winning teams are from the Wake Forest Regenerative Medicine Research Institute (WFIRM) in North Carolina, USA. They are the Winston team and the WFIRM team. They have cultivated strong human liver tissue. , To survive and function in a way similar to the human body. The two teams used different 3D printing technologies to construct a cube-shaped human liver tissue about 1 cm thick, which can work in the laboratory for 30 days.
In the short-term, the research can be used to accelerate drug testing and disease modeling, and in the long-term, it can help develop artificial organs using patients’ own cells and perform organ transplants. “I can’t exaggerate how impressive this achievement is. When NASA opened this challenge in 2016, we weren’t sure if anyone would win,” said Jim Reuter, NASA’s deputy director of space technology. By the time the first artificial organ transplantation occurs, and there is a little role in this challenge, it will be extraordinary.”
The Winston team is the first to be the first under the challenge rules The team that completes the experiment will receive a $300,000 bonus. The WFIRM team will receive a second prize of US$100,000.
The vascularized thick tissue models produced in the challenge will be used as organ models. These models can be used to study the effects of space radiation on the human body and record organ functions under microgravity , Which helps to find a way to reduce the damage of the space environment to healthy cells. Compared to tissues built on Earth, microgravity conditions may also help create tissues that are larger, more complex, and that look and function more like human tissue.
The National Laboratory of the International Space Station will work with the Winston team to adjust the methods of organization on Earth to adapt to the space environment. If this research can be carried out on the space station, the combination of the improved vascular system and microgravity may bring new progress to tissue engineering and space biomanufacturing on Earth.