MU receives grant to study how cells organize to form organs

By Shannan Tucker

September 9, 2005

The journey of a developing embryo into a complex adult is a process scientists call biological self-assembly. A nearly $5 million grant from the National Science Foundation will allow a research team led by Gabor Forgacs, MU professor of biological physics, to find out how the process works.

The project, "Understanding and Employing Tissue Self-Assembly," will examine the cells that bond and form organs by means of biological self-assembly.

"How do cells self-organize and finally build organs? We need to first understand as much as we can about this process," Forgacs said.

An understanding will allow researchers to mimic self-assembly in a laboratory. The knowledge could then be used to advance a developing technology: organ printing.

Organ printing is a method of engineering biological structures such as organs or parts of organs so they might be used in transplantation. The method will extract cells from a patient with a malfunctioning organ and use those cells to create a replacement organ.

Organ printing has the potential to revolutionize current transplantation methods. The need for organ donors and the risk of the body rejecting a transplanted organ would no longer be a concern.

"This might sound a little bit like science fiction, but it really isn't," Forgacs said. "I think results already show that eventually this will work."

Organ printing may be years in the making, but for now Forgacs and his team of researchers, who have backgrounds in a wide range of physical and biological sciences, will focus on their primary goal of discovering why and how cells organize.

Copyright © 2005 Columbia Missiourian.

This article posted October 1, 2005.