An Update from the Methuselah Foundation ' s Vascular Tissue Challenge

Today, an update on the Vascular Tissue Challenge arrived in my in-box. It's been a year or so since the Methuselah Foundation and NASA jointly announced the Vascular Tissue Challenge, conducted as a part of the foundation's New Organ initiative. The challenge is a $500,000 research prize intended to draw greater attention to - and investment in - efforts that aim to surmount the greatest present roadblock in the field of tissue engineering: how to build tissues that contain the capillary networks required to sustain them. Natural tissues are packed with capillaries, hundreds passing through every square millimeter examined in cross-section. Reproducing this complexity in artificially grown tissues has proven to be very difficult. Yet other complex aspects of tissue growth have been solved: in the past few years, researchers have demonstrated themselves able to produce near fully functional organ tissues of many varieties. Unfortunately, since capillary networks are not yet a part of this picture, such solid tissue sections are limited in size to a few millimeters in their broadest dimension. The goal of the New Organ initiative is the construction of patient-matched organs, as needed, from cell samples. To build any sizable tissue requires a life-like vascular network; there is no way around that. Given the impressive progress to date in every other aspect of tissue engineering required, however, it is fair to say that if the research community had a reliable solution...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Activism, Advocacy and Education Source Type: blogs