Awarded in 2025
Home Department: Bioengineering
Faculty Advisors: Mark Skylar-Scott (Bioengineering) and Joseph Wu (Medicine – Cardiovascular Medicine)

Research Title: Organ-Scale Multicellular Continuous Bioprinting

Heart failure is a leading cause of death, with organ shortages leaving millions without transplants. 3D bioprinting using patient-specific iPSC-derived cardiomyocytes shows promise but struggles to produce organ-scale tissues due to slow printing speeds and cell viability loss. Cells in unperfused syringes risk degradation during long prints. Yi Yi’s proposed ‘BioEngine’ addresses this by maintaining and continuously extracting cells in a stirred bioreactor, concentrating cells to physiologically representative densities, mixing cells with extracellular matrix, and printing the prepared bioink in a four-stroke cycle—akin to an internal combustion engine (ICE). This approach preserves cell viability and achieves continuous on-the-fly bioink composition adjustments during extended printing, advancing the feasibility of bioprinting functional, organ-scale cardiac tissues.