Taking synthetic organs from the lab to a chip: Anthony Atala and the advance of 3D cell biology

Anthony Atala, Director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine (NC, USA), has had a long and illustrious career working in the development of lab-grown organoids to resolve the issue of long waiting lists for organ transplants. But Atala’s work spreads far beyond this one field. Here, Atala describes the changes he has observed in the field of regenerative medicine since his successful transplantation of a lab-grown bladder in 1999 – the achievement for which he is perhaps best known – and explores the challenges of developing these synthetic organoids. Having presided over the advance of several technologies to...