Mass General Brigham investigators join THUMPIN’ initiative to develop living, bioengineered heart tissues for children
Project aims to create living cardiac components — and ultimately a complete heart — for infants and young children with congenital heart disease.
Researchers from Mass General Brigham’s Heart and Vascular Institute will collaborate with colleagues from Boston Children’s Hospital, Harvard’s John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), and NTT Research as part of THUMPIN' (Tissue-engineered Hearts Using Multimodal Printing in Newborns), a Boston Children’s-led research consortium. Supported by a contract from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) and other funders, which can be up to five years and $29.6 million, THUMPIN' aims to bioengineer living cardiac tissues and components, with the ultimate goal of bringing those components together into a complete, functioning heart for infants and young children with congenital heart disease.
The initiative is designed to address one of the most pressing challenges in pediatric heart care: providing lasting treatment options for complex congenital heart defects that can adapt and grow with the child. Mass General Brigham’s Heart and Vascular Institute’s cardiovascular expertise will contribute to the consortium's effort to engineer living cardiac tissue for infants and young children.
“This project challenges us to move beyond repairing damaged cardiac structures and toward engineering living replacement tissues from the ground up,” said Elena Aikawa, MD, PhD, an investigator with the Mass General Brigham Heart and Vascular Institute. “The convergence of biofabrication, regenerative medicine, and computational approaches creates a unique opportunity to develop solutions that have long been considered out of reach.”
Led by THUMPIN’ Principal Investigator Kit Parker, PhD, a Senior Scientist at Boston Children’s Hospital, the consortium brings together experts in pediatric cardiac surgery, tissue engineering, stem cell biology, additive manufacturing, and computational modeling.
“For babies born with complex congenital heart defects, repairing the heart is only part of the challenge. The infant keeps growing. The repair does not,” said Parker. “THUMPIN’ brings together a team of clinicians and researchers to rethink what is possible in pediatric heart care: a living, adaptive intervention capable of growing alongside its patient.”
Over the five-year project, the THUMPIN' team will develop and test the cells, tissues, manufacturing methods, and computational tools required to engineer living cardiac structures, including heart valves, vascular grafts, myocardial patches, components of the conduction system, single ventricles, and ultimately a whole heart. The project will progress from laboratory testing to studies of bioengineered heart tissues in large-animal models, while establishing the manufacturing, safety, and regulatory foundation needed to move the technology toward future human studies.
The consortium will establish the manufacturing, testing, and regulatory foundation needed to advance these technologies toward an eventual U.S. Food and Drug Administration Investigational Device Exemption, bringing first-in-human clinical studies closer to reality.
Manufacturing efforts will be led in partnership with Landmark Bio, a public-private company co-founded by Harvard University, MIT, and industry partners, with Boston Children’s Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital as collaborating institutions.
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Mass General Brigham is an integrated academic health care system, uniting great minds to solve the hardest problems in medicine for our communities and the world. Mass General Brigham connects a full continuum of care across a system of academic medical centers, community and specialty hospitals, a health insurance plan, physician networks, community health centers, home care, and long-term care services. Mass General Brigham is a nonprofit organization committed to patient care, research, teaching, and service to the community. In addition, Mass General Brigham is one of the nation’s leading biomedical research organizations with several Harvard Medical School teaching hospitals. For more information, please visit massgeneralbrigham.org.