NIH Grants Jinho Kim $623K to Create Tissues and Organs That Could Save Lives

The biomedical engineering assistant professor's efforts are part of a larger $6.8M collaborative grant with Columbia University and Tufts University

Through a $622,688 grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Jinho Kim, assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology, is working on groundbreaking technologies designed to regenerate and even create tissues and entire organs that work just like those in the human body.

Jinho Kim, Assistant Professor, Department of Biomedical Engineering

Part of a major $6.8 million grant supporting the Tissue Engineering Resource Center at Columbia University, Kim's research has the potential to drive life-saving advances in tissue and organ transplants, facilitate therapeutic development and study diseases.

"We use tissue engineering technology to create natural or synthetic tissues and organs to treat various injuries and diseases," Kim explained. "We also use this technology to help pharmaceutical companies reduce the cost and time needed to produce drugs with engineered tissues or organs that can be used as drug screening platforms before trying them on humans. Through this grant, we are excited to work to bring better solutions to patients faster."

Delivering a breath of fresh air in donor lungs for more than a decade, Kim has been researching how to replace human lungs in patients suffering from severe lung diseases such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), cystic fibrosis and pulmonary fibrosis.

"Almost 80% of donated lungs are rejected for transplant because the quality is not good enough," he noted. "One of our goals with the Tissue Engineering Resource Center is to create technology that can repair disqualified donor lungs so they can be transplanted - and we can save more lives."

Supporting live tissues outside the body

In addition to addressing donor lung shortage, another revolutionary project involves creating "organ-on-a-chip" devices that can grow human tissues or even entire organs in the lab to better understand how cancer extends through a body.

"In breast cancer, for example, mutated cells can tend to migrate to the brain and the bones," Kim said. "We're working to develop a microchip that connects breast cancer tissue, brain tissue and bone tissue through a microchannel that mimics the blood vessel, so we can explore the fundamental mechanisms of how those cells escape their original location and go to a certain specific part of the body so that we can prevent the spread of the cancer."

To keep tissues and organs alive and viable outside the body, Kim and his team have developed groundbreaking computer-controlled electromechanical systems called bioreactors that help tissues act as if they were still inside the body.

"The benefit of this ability to support tissues outside the body is that we can study them," he said. "By ensuring these standalone tissues and organs can survive for multiple days, we can do the drug screening and other experiments without any risks to humans. That's what's exciting - the opportunity to expedite our ability to translate this innovative laboratory technology to procedures that can make a meaningful difference in the real world."

The Tissue Engineering Resource Center will include six expert investigators from diverse disciplines, including Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic, Ph.D. from Columbia University and David Kaplan, Ph.D. from Tufts University. They will connect with leaders in the field throughout the United States and internationally. They will also train the next generation of engineers and scientists with outreach programs that engage middle and high school students in this innovative bioengineering technology.