New Organ – $1M Prize

In January, I posted that 2014 was the year of the 3D printed liver, and now the Methuselah Corporation has a $1 Million prize for creating a usable liver. On Tuesday, Six teams were announced as competing for the prize, which needs to be claimed by December 2018.

The website is really nifty looking: www.neworgan.org , and the teams have various approaches to the problem:

● Dr. Tahera Ansari (Team Hepavive): Pursuing the ‘decell-recell’ approach to bioengineering a liver.
● Dr. Stephen Badylak (Team Badylak): A pioneer in biologic scaffolds using extracellular matrix.
● Dr. Eric Lagasse (Team Ectogenesis): Grew mini-livers inside the lymph nodes of mice with liver disease.
● Dr. Bryon Petersen (Team Petersen): An authority on the role of hepatic stem cells in liver pathology.
● Dr. Takanori Takebe (Team Organ Creative): Created tiny ‘liver buds’ that grew and functioned in mice.
● Dr. Basak Uygun (Team HepaTx): First to report proof-of-principle transplantation of engineered liver grafts.

I, for one, welcome our future liver overlords.