ABOUT THE PROJECT

The EU H2020 FET-Open Pan3DP project is a multi-disciplinary consortium with the goal of developing an innovative bioprinting approach for generating pancreatic tissue. Pancreatic diseases, including diabetes, pancreatic cancer and acute and chronic pancreatitis, affect approximately 9.35% of the global population and in 2019, diabetes alone was responsible for 4.2 million deaths [1][2]. Despite the obvious need for new therapies to treat these diseases, developing new therapies is hampered by limited access to in vivo pancreatic tissue which reliably models the organ itself.

By combining the diverse expertise of our project partners in the fields of regenerative medicine, developmental biology, computational biology and bioengineering we plan to develop an approach that uses 3D-printing techniques to create embryonic pancreatic tissue, which will acquire mature pancreatic properties in the lab. This 3D-printed tissue can be used to model pancreatic diseases and test new therapies as well as studying normal pancreatic development and functioning. In addition to advancing the study of pancreatic diseases, the knowledge generated by our research project will also drive major technological advances in the field of tissue-engineering and bioprinting and possibly even facilitate the replacement of injured or diseased tissue.

[1] Xiao et al 2016 Lancet. 1(1) 45-55

[2] https://www.idf.org/aboutdiabetes/what-is-diabetes/facts-figures.html

OUR Project team:

Francesca M. Spagnoli (KCL) - King’s College London, United Kingdom

Limor Landsman (TAU) - Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel

Christophe Pierreux (DDI) - de Duve Institute-UCL, Brussels, Belgium

Dagmar Iber (ETH) - ETH, Basel, Switzerland

Shulamit Levenberg (TEC) - Technion Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel

Fabien Guillemot, Poietis (POI) - Bioparc Bordeaux Métropole, France