Is it possible to create a human pancreas in the lab that secretes hormones just like a real one? Associate Professor Riccardo Levato aims to make this a reality. He received an ERC Consolidator Grant of approximately €2.3 million to develop this vision over five years, innovating on a groundbreaking technology his team at UMC Utrecht and Utrecht University recently created: a 3D bioprinter that not only prints tissues but also observes and co-designs them in real time, guided by artificial intelligence.
Three-dimensional bioprinting could change medicine by allowing us to build human tissues in the lab. Right now, bioprinting is promising, but once the cells are printed, we can’t really watch how they develop or step in to guide them. This makes it hard to create tissues that resemble nature. If we learn how to observe and steer the way bioprinted tissues grow and adapt, we can get much closer to repair damaged tissue, testing new drugs, and even replace entire organs.
Riccardo Levato
Upon receiving an ERC Starting Grant in 2020, Riccardo Levato and his team developed a groundbreaking technology to overcome these challenges. Their invention, called GRACE, is a new kind of 3D bioprinter that not only prints living tissues but also watches them as they form and helps further design them. While printing, GRACE uses advanced imaging to ‘see’ what the cells are doing. It then uses artificial intelligence to make informed decisions on how to precisely build or modify cellular environments, for example, designing a network of blood vessels around cells. The printer essentially has its own ‘eyes’ – the laser-based imaging – and ‘brain’ – the new AI software.
Levato has now received an ERC Consolidator Grant to further build on this technology. Before it can be used in real medical treatments, researchers need to understand how printed cells grow, change, and organise themselves over time. This process, called maturation, is what allows cells to develop into stable, fully functioning tissue that behaves like the tissue inside a real organ.
In the SMART-AGENT project, Levato and his team aim to achieve this through three main goals. First, they will enable the printer to recognize different cell types and collect key information, so it can make smart decisions while building tissues. Second, the printer needs to become able to directly control cell behaviour by precisely stimulating gene and protein activity. It will do so using light-based synthetic biology and optogenetics techniques.
Finally, the team will evaluate the technology’s potential by creating a vascularized human pancreas model that mimics natural hormone secretion. This model will provide for a new platform for studying pancreatic biology and testing diabetes treatments. “I am very confident that we will succeed in the creation of such a model”, Levato says. But the goal of the project is broader. “We aim to develop a roadmap for the creation of vascularised tissues, of any type. Including a 3D printer that guides cells as they grow and develop.”
