A viable organ engineering pipeline requires the mass production of hundreds of billions of cells, tailorable and programmable cellular composition, and technologies to assemble these cells with perfusable vascular networks to support cell viability. Dr. Mark Skylar-Scott's lab is developing integrative technologies, including wetware, hardware, and software, to address cardiac tissue engineering at whole-organ scale.

The Skylar-Scott laboratory is developing technologies to advance whole organ engineering: How can we grow hundreds of billions of cells, and assemble them rapidly into functional and vascularized tissues? The HEART program is one of the key projects spearheaded by the Skylar-Scott lab and is supported by the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), which aims to scale up, bioprint, and implant a fully functional human heart into a living pig within five years. Our laboratory is developing a range of technologies in wetware, software, and hardware by combining stem cell engineering, 3D bioprinting, and tissue vascularization and perfusion.