Mark Skylar-Scott is an Assistant Professor of Bioengineering at Stanford, a member of the Basic Science and Engineering Initiative at the Children’s Heart Center and a Chan-Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator. Mark Skylar-Scott received his B.A. and M.Eng. degrees in Engineering at the University of Cambridge in 2007. For his doctoral thesis under the guidance of Prof. M. Fatih Yanik at MIT, he developed multiphoton photopatterning techniques to print full length proteins on 2D surfaces and in 3D scaffolds to probe and direct neural and vascular growth. After his PhD, he briefly worked at Formlabs as a materials engineer where he helped to develop their first commercial printer resin. For his postdoctoral research at Harvard and the Wyss Institute with Prof. Jennifer Lewis, he performed 3D bioprinting of thick and vascularized tissues, and created new high-throughput multimaterial multinozzle 3D printing systems. He has received the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award and an ARPA-H Award to support the development of new 3D printing hardware, wetware, and software to accelerate cardiovascular tissue engineering towards thick, vascularized, and functionally therapeutic organs.

Topic title: From the Petri Dish Towards Whole Organs: Scaling Up 3D Bioprinting

Abstract:

Single ventricle disease, wherein a child is only born with a single functional ventricle, is a serious congenital heart defect that can be partly managed by the Fontan Procedure that connects both the right and left sided circulatory systems in series. While this can provide decades of near-normal life, the Fontan circulation results in excessive central venous pressure and ultimately end-organ failure. We propose the construction of a living and beating cardiac biopump that can serve like a second ventricle to regularize the venous pressure. Achieving this will require billions of contractile cells that are arranged into a contractile chamber and supplied by a pervasive vascular system. In this talk, I will discuss our strategies to scale stem cell engineering using synthetic biology and bioreactor technologies. When combined with 3D bioprinted vasculature and densely cellular bioinks, we aim to manufacture large scale heart tissues that remainviable for functional therapeutics.