Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center: Engineering Tissues and Organs with a Printer
ABOUT WAKE FOREST INSTITUTE FOR REGENERATIVE MEDICINE
ANTHONY ATALA, M.D., is the director of the Institute for Regenerative Medicine and the W.H. Boyce Professor and Chair of the Department of Urology at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center. He has received the Christopher Columbus Award, World Technology Award in Medicine, Samuel Gross Prize, Barringer Medal, and Gold Cystoscope award. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine. His medical breakthroughs have been featured in various media, including Time magazine and U.S. News & World Report. Atala is one of the pioneers of regenerative medicine and focuses on growing new human cells, tissues and organs. Atala is also a Charter Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors. In 1999, Atala’s team was the first in the world to engineer organs in the lab that were implanted in patients. Bladders — made from patient’s own cells — were implanted into children and adolescents with spina bifida. With the goal of making the process more precise, Atala’s team has built a one-of-a-kind printer that can literally “print” new tissues and organ prototypes. The concept is very similar to how a home or office printer works except that rather than ink, the printers uses cells and biomaterials. Just like the hand-made bladder that was engineered in the lab, a printed organ or tissue would be implanted in the body — nature’s incubator — where it would continue to develop and integrate with the body’s own tissues. Another project that Atala’s team is working on is printing skin cells onto burn wounds. For example, a patient is in need of a skin graft because of a serious burn but does not
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The Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine (www.wfirm.org) is an established center dedicated to the discovery, development and clinical translation of regenerative medicine technologies by leading faculty. The institute has used biomaterials alone, cell therapies, and engineered tissues and organs for the treatment of patients with injury or disease. The Institute is based at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center (www.wakehealth.edu), an academic medical center located in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Wake Forest Baptist’s clinical programs have consistently ranked as among the best in the country by U.S .News & World Report for the past 20 years.
have enough healthy skin to harvest. Atala’s team is developing a system to print cells directly onto burn wounds to promote the formation of new skin. In an effort to give back to the veterans who have been horribly affected by war injuries, Atala co-leads the Armed Forces Institute for Regenerative Medicine (AFIRM), a federally funded program to apply regenerative medicine to battlefield injuries. Atala, holding many patents in organ reconstruction and tissue engineering, works in collaboration with more than 30 AFIRM institutions in tackling a science that is ahead of its time.