Five Questions With: Jeffrey Morgan

"Building an entire organ such as a liver or a kidney is one of the grand challenges of the field of biomedical engineering, so it is difficult to say when the first transplantable organ will be made."

Dr. Jeffrey Morgan is professor of medical science, professor of engineering, and director of biomedical engineering at Brown University. A new device that he co-created with Brown’s Dr. Andrew Blakely may eventually build replacement human organs. A paper about the device, known as BioP3, just appeared in the peer-reviewed journal Tissue Engineering Part C. Morgan recently received a $1.4 million grant from the National Science Foundation to continue his development of the BioP3.

PBN: Is scarcity the central reason for attempting to produce artificial organs? How many organs are transplanted annually (roughly), and how many would be transplanted if there were no shortage?
MORGAN:
There are major worldwide shortages of organs for transplantation and even a very ugly black market in human organs. In the United States, the non-profit United Network For Organ Sharing manages the transplant waiting list and matches donors. According to UNOS data we know that there are about 123,000 waiting list candidates, including about 79,000 people who are “actively” waiting. Between January and September of 2014 there were 21,919 transplants performed thanks to 10,679 donors.

PBN: If the momentum you’ve developed with building tissues continued without a major stumbling block, how soon could you imagine having the first transplantable organ?
MORGAN
: Building an entire organ such as a liver or a kidney is one of the grand challenges of the field of biomedical engineering, so it is difficult to say when the first transplantable organ will be made, but there are many breakthroughs on several fronts that are creating new optimism and excitement in this area.

PBN: What are some of the more promising emerging technologies in the field?
MORGAN:
Stem cells are one. It has been shown by many labs that cells harvested from adults can be reprogrammed into stem cells that can be further coaxed in the petri dish to transform into the cells needed to build organs such as liver cells or cells of the pancreas. Most recently, it has been shown that these stem cells can be scaled up, grown for many weeks in culture to produce the extraordinary numbers of cells needed to fabricate an organ. So, it is feasible to produce the raw living materials needed to build an organ.

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PBN: What’s the single greatest obstacle confronting you in producing microtissues?
MORGAN
: It is important to keep in mind the very large numbers of cells that are needed. For example, an adult liver has about 300 hundred billion cells, the kidney and the heart about 10 billion cells each and the pancreas about 3 billion cells. Of course, there is a cost to grow these large numbers of cells and this is a significant obstacle. But over the years the cost of growing cells has declined and will probably continue to decline due to innovation much like the cost of computer memory has declined over time. New technologies will be needed to assemble these large numbers of living cells into functional, 3-D organs.
This is the issue we address with of our new device, the BioPick, Place and Perfuse (BioP3). Our inspiration came from the electronics industry that has used pick-and-place technologies for the manufacturing of integrated circuit boards so we know this is an industrially relevant and scalable technology.
The new grant I just received from the National Science Foundation for $1.4 million will enable us to make major advancements in this device and achieve the goal of producing what we are calling “proto-organs,” small versions not ready for humans but that contain large numbers of cells and perform key biological functions for extended periods of time.

PBN: How far off would you estimate transplant of any of the tissues you’re fabricating into animals to be?
MORGAN:
With this device, we don’t have to follow the blueprint of a normal liver or a kidney. We can test new designs and learn a new language of organ and tissue fabrication that I suspect will lead to additional applications in tissue repair and regeneration such as living patches for repair. Our goal in 3 to 4 years is to test these proto-organs in appropriate animal models prior to any clinical application.

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