Trinity bioengineer secures Wellcome funding to develop new tissue engineering approach

Posted on: 30 August 2024

Dr Wu will use funding of €800,000, which will support research for five years, as she progresses the OPTO-BIOPRINTING project.

Tissue engineering holds promise for providing living organ replacements but existing strategies fail to mimic normal physiological development, during which finely coordinated spatiotemporal gradients of signalling molecules choreograph cellular and tissue development. As a result, even state-of-the art artificial tissues and organs cannot perform as well as their fully native equivalents.

The goal of OPTO-BIOPRINTING is to change this by establishing an entirely new platform for spatiotemporally guided tissue engineering, leveraging cellular self-assembly, while also incorporating layers of regulation to the process. As part of the plan, Dr Wu and her team hope to develop the ability to use light to trigger cells to produce specific proteins where they are needed on demand.

Dr  Wu will develop a cartilage-bone unit as a proof-of-concept, but the project impact should extend to engineering of other tissue types for a suite of regenerative medicine and disease modelling applications.

Dr Wu, who is also a postdoctoral researcher at the AMBER Centre and CRANN institute in Trinity, said: “I’m immensely grateful for the support of a Wellcome Trust Early Career Award. It represents an important stepping stone in my pathway to independence, and I’m excited to bring together two powerful technologies for patterning tissue complexity and see where it can take the field of tissue engineering.

“Previous funding support from a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship (ADMIRE COFUND) made this award possible, and I’d also like to acknowledge the continued support from friends, colleagues, mentors, and Trinity’s Research Development Office.”

The Wellcome Early Career Awards scheme provides funding for early-career researchers from any discipline who are ready to develop their research identity. Through innovative projects, they will deliver shifts in understanding related to human life, health and wellbeing. By the end of the award, they will be ready to lead their own independent research programme. 

Professor Sinéad Ryan, Dean of Research at Trinity College Dublin, said: “Organ and tissue transplantation, both live and artificial, can offer improved quality of life for people experiencing a range of medical conditions. Researchers and clinicians are doing crucial work to bridge the gap between the effectiveness of live tissue and its artificial counterparts. Josephine’s project can help narrow that gap, with any leaps forward likely to have positive impacts for many different types of engineered tissues and regenerative therapies.”

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