Discipline: Tissue Engineering

Technologies 5

• Regenerating heart valves
  The human heart beats approximately 35 million times every year, pumping blood into the circulation via four different heart valves. In more than four million people each year, heart valves fail for different reasons, including birth defects, age-related deteriorations and infections. At present, clinicians use either artificial prostheses or fixed animal and cadaver-sourced tissue to...
• Ultra-Strong Flexible Biomaterials
  Hydrogels are already being developed for use as scaffolds for tissue engineering, vehicles for drug delivery, actuators for optics and fluidics, and models for biological studies of tissue-supporting material called the extracellular matrix. But these water-rich polymer gels are weak; they rupture if stretched just a little, and they break easily compared with resilient biological...
• Human Organs-on-Chips
  Clinical studies take years to complete and testing a single compound can cost more than $2 billion. Meanwhile, innumerable animal lives are lost, and the process often fails to predict human responses because traditional animal models often do not accurately mimic human pathophysiology. For these reasons, there is a broad need for alternative ways to...
• 4D Printing of Shapeshifting Devices
  Organisms, such as flowers and plants, have tissue compositions and microstructures creating dynamic morphologies that can shapeshift in response to changes in their environments. Researchers at the Wyss Institute have mimicked a variety of such dynamic shape changes like those performed by tendrils, leaves, and flowers in response to changes in humidity or temperature with...
• 3D Bioprinting of Living Tissues
  Progress in drug testing and regenerative medicine could greatly benefit from laboratory-engineered human tissues built of a variety of cell types with precise 3D architecture. But production of greater than millimeter sized human tissues has been limited by a lack of methods for building tissues with embedded life-sustaining vascular networks. In this video, the Wyss...

News 70

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• Press Release Wyss Institute’s Organ Chips get smart and go electric
  June 14, 2017
• Press Release Engineering heart valves for the many
  May 18, 2017
• Press Release Engineering human stem cells to model the kidney’s filtration barrier on a chip
  May 10, 2017

Multimedia 2

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  Video/Animation
  3D Printed Heart-on-a-Chip
  In this video, learn how Wyss Institute and Harvard SEAS researchers have created a 3D-printed heart-on-a-chip that could lead to new customizable devices for short-term and long-term in vitro testing. Credit: Johan U. Lind (Disease Biophysics Group), Alex D. Valentine and Lori K. Sanders (Lewis Lab)/Harvard University

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  Video/Animation
  Bioprinting: The Kidney’s Proximal Tubules
  In this video, see how the Wyss Institute team has advanced bioprinting to the point of being able to fabricate a functional subunit of a kidney. Credit: Wyss Institute at Harvard University