The StemCell Podcast: Episode 198 'Printing Human Tissue with Dr. Anthony Atala'

I chose to listen to The Stem Cell Podcast:  Episode 198 “Printing Human Tissues because it  featured Dr. Anthony Atala, the Founding Director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine (WFIRM). WFIRM is a member of InnovATEBIO and an international leader in  translating scientific discovery into clinical therapies. The team is working to engineer more than 40 different replacement tissues and organs, and were the first in the world to engineer laboratory-grown organs that were successfully implanted into humans. Dr. Atala is very passionate about his work and describes how it can take decades to develop these technologies, but that they must be cautious, treat a small number of patients and then watch and wait to make sure the procedure does not cause harm. He discusses how autologous cells are the safest to use when making constructs as they are the least likely to do harm to the patient. The human body has many layers of complexity in its organs, from skin, which is somewhat flat, to a solid organ such as the liver. Vascularity plays an important role in building the organs and can be quite challenging. And, unlike bricks and cement, cells have their own programming and Dr. Atala describes how the stem cells need to be supported to reach their full potential. Dr. Atala is justifiably proud of his team and shares a few details about the work two teams of scientists from WFIRM accomplished when they won first and second place in NASA’s Vascular Tissue Challenge. When asked why he chose to make the move to WFIRM, he said that North Carolina is ranked third in the country for biotech, and he knew that the institute, the city, and the state all support biotech. In addition, he believes that the cost of living is relatively low and the area is a great place to live, especially for families. When asked about the future, Dr. Atala is enthusiastic, and predicts that organogenesis needs to be standardized and made affordable for everyone—“industrial organogenesis”.

The Stem Cell Podcast did not cover just Dr. Atala. It started out with a 4-part roundup of some stem cell science that the hosts wanted listeners to know about. The articles the hosts talk about are all from the journal Science and are not free, which makes their summaries even more useful, as the projects described in the articles are quite compelling.

The first publication was “Generation of ovarian follicles from mouse pluripotent stem cells.  Potentially revolutionizing research, it would allow researchers to drop the use of fetal tissue by developing an alternative method for mouse (and hopefully human) gametes.

The second journal article discussed was “An isoform of Dicer protects mammalian stem cells against multiple RNA viruses”.  As was said in the podcast, Mother Nature is the original hoarder.  Dicer is an antiviral mechanism that is not active in differentiated cells, but serves to protect bacteria from RNA viruses. However, the authors found that adult stem cells have a particular isoform of Dicer (aviD) which appear to protect against RNA viruses such as COVID-19 and Zika. Wouldn’t that be great, if we could have within us a means of protection outside the immune system?  Stay tuned!

The third article was in line with Dr Atala’s discussion as it was entitled “Dynamic loading of human engineered heart tissue enhances contractile function and drives a desmosome-linked disease phenotype”. The article details progress on engineered heart tissue systems which is a crucial step to studying heart disease.

The final article dovetailed with the previous article as it was about circulation dysfunction, and ideas to combat it.  “iPSC-endothelial cell phenotypic drug screening and in silico analysis identify tyrphostin-AG1296 for pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH)”. IT is great to see how stem cells can move research forward in so many ways.

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