Trinity researcher scores €800,000 to boost regenerative medicine

Wu’s Opto-BioPrinting project aims to create a new approach to improve tissue engineering, which could help those receiving artificial transplants.

Dr Josephine Wu, a researcher at Trinity College Dublin’s School of Engineering, has secured a Wellcome Early Career Award to pursue an exciting tissue engineering project.

Wu was awarded €800,000 to support her Opto-BioPrinting project for five years. The project aims to tackle a key issue in this field. Existing tissue engineering strategies fail to mimic normal physiological development, which means artificial tissues and organs fail to perform as well as their natural equivalents.

Wu – a postdoctoral researcher at the Amber Centre and Crann Institute in Trinity – aims to create an entirely new platform for spatiotemporally guided tissue engineering. This new approach involves using light to make cells produce specific proteins where they are needed on demand.

Wu and her team plan to develop a cartilage-bone unit as a proof of concept, but they believe the new approach could extend to other types of tissue engineering, leading to various improvements in regenerative medicine and disease modelling.

Speaking about the project, Trinity dean of research Prof Sinéad Ryan said organ and tissue transplantation 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,” Ryan said. “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.”

The Wellcome Early Career Awards scheme provides funding for early-career researchers from any discipline who are ready to develop their research identity.

“I’m immensely grateful for the support of a Wellcome Trust Early Career Award,” Wu said. “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 made this award possible, and I’d also like to acknowledge the continued support from friends, colleagues, mentors and Trinity’s Research Development Office.”

In 2021, a study led by researchers at the RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences suggested that wound healing could be improved by replicating a key component of our blood.

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