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In a column in the newspaper Le Monde - Sciences & Médecine, members of the IFBF with other scientists call for organoids not to be considered as "mini-organs" because "they are still far from reproducing the function of entire organs in vitro and from restoring it in the human body". The authors of this column warn of the negative interpretations that could result as well as the unjustified hopes that could rise.

The Alliance for Regenerative Medicine will hold a 1-day workshop on Tissue Engineering and Therapeutics on September 6, 2023.

This workshop will highlight scientific advances, CMC (chemistry, manufacturing, and controls) and regulatory insights, and funding perspectives.

It will take place in Bethesda, Rockville MD but participating remotely is possible.

Please see the program of the day and register by visiting the ARM web site here.

Paris-Saclay University is organizing a scientific day “Bio-Engineering and Synthetic Biology”. This symposium aims to bring together researchers from different fields (from protein engineering to artificial organs) so that the different communities can get to know each other and collaborate in the future.

Hepatic and brain organoids, organs-on-chip and bio-artificial organs will be presented by members of IFBF.

The symposium will take place on Wednesday, November 16, 2022.

You can access the presentation of the day and the conditions of registration by clicking here or by downloading this document.

Specialized in the production and sales of hepatic spheroids encapsulated in an alginate pearl with a liquid core, Cyprio offers a  permanent position to an engineered in fluidics & automation.

Cyprio collaborates with UMRS_1193 in the research project iPearls.

Read the text of the offer here.

Specialized in the production and sales of hepatic spheroids encapsulated in an alginate pearl with a liquid core, Cyprio offers a  permanent position to a laboratory technician.

Read the text of the offer here (in French).

FRM has made research in restorative medicine a priority area of research support.

Following its 2021 call for projects, 7 proposals were selected, including 2 presented by members of IFBF.

Maxime Mahé leads the project "Recreating a transplantable human small intestine" using intestinal organoids reconstituted by bioengineering and Jean-Charles Duclos-Vallée the pre-clinical trial "Organoids to replace the liver?".

You will find the description of the projects financed by FRM on this page of its site (in French).

The call winners, including M. Mahé on the right and JC Duclos-Vallée behind him,

gathered at the FRM headquarters last May.

This offer of an engineer position is part of a project supported by the Ile-de-France region which aims at producing on a medium/large scale hepatic organoids from induced pluripotent stem cells. These organoids will be encapsulated in alginate beads and will used in predictive toxicology. This project is carried out thanks to an academic (UMR_S 1193) and industrial (CYPRIO) partnership. UMR_S 1193 and CYPRIO are both members of IFBF.

Read the text of the offer here.

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3DBio Therapeutics, a regenerative medicine company, and the Microtia-Congenital Ear Deformity Institute announced they have conducted a human ear reconstruction using a patient-matched, 3D-bioprinted living tissue ear implant. The groundbreaking reconstructive procedure in the first-in-human Phase 1/2a clinical trial is evaluating the safety and preliminary efficacy of the implant for patients with microtia, a rare congenital deformity where one or both outer ears are absent or underdeveloped.

You will fin the press release here or on the BusinessWire site.

Patient before transplant (left) and 30 days after the procedure (right)

Microtia-Congenital Ear Institute and 3DBio Therapeutics

The "Hepatic Organoids" group of UMRS_1193 is looking for an engineer for a period of 3 years as part of a project funded by the "Fondation pour la Recherche Médicale"

The project aims to study liver organoid transplantation in models of severe hepatitis.

To apply, please send your application to the following email addresses: jean-charles.duclos-vallee@aphp.fr and/or jean-charles.duclos-vallee@ifbf-institute.org

The Paris-Saclay Cellular Imaging Network is organizing a 2-hour videoconference on April 14 on the theme of organoid imaging.
The network offers you a kind of pipeline on the imaging of organoid models which will allow you to better understand the whole manufacturing process, their modes of transparency, the analysis of 3D images associated with this type of thick sample, and finally, the importance of studying these models in humans to develop new therapeutic tools.

Free but compulsory registration on www.ric-paris-saclay.fr 

Download the conference poster here.

Whatever the cause, liver diseasse can lead to severe liver failure for which a liver transplant becomes necessary. Today, the use of hepatic organoids, derived from human induced Pluripotent Stem Cells (hiPSC), appears to be a promising prospect of palliative therapy for the shortage of grafts.

Using guided differentiation and three-dimensional culture, a team from UMR-S 1193 (CHB Hepato-Biliary Center, Paul-Brousse Hospital, Villejuif), generated, from hiPSCs, organoids containing hepatocytes with morphological and functional characteristics, for the first time, almost similar to those of primary human hepatocytes. In the study published in Cells, the researchers show that these organoids are able to reproduce in vitro functions such as the regulated metabolism of sugars and lipids which are essential for the homeostasis of the organism, as well as the production of bile essential for the proper absorption of lipids and the ability to detoxify drugs and toxic substances from metabolism or the environment.

The organoids thus produced could become valuable tools for the development and optimization of preclinical applications, such as new platforms for screening drug candidates and the study of their toxicity, and clinical applications such as new biomedical devices like external bioartificial livers (BAL), or even transplantation.

This work was carried out as part of the RHU iLite project funded by the PIA2 in the form of grant ANR-16-RHUS-0005.

The study can be downloaded here.

BioValley is a pan-European cluster bringing together players in the fields of health and life sciences, French, German and Swiss based in the Rhine Valley.

On February 23 and 24, BioValley France is organizing a workshop devoted to organs-on-a-chip, which will be an opportunity for researchers, entrepreneurs and representatives of the pharmaceutical industry to present their work.

Cécile Legallais and Jean-Charles Duclos-Vallée, members of the Scientific Committee of IFBF, will speak.

This video presents the workshop.

ESCP is launching two new specializations allowing its students to acquire hybrid skills. According to its Deputy Director General in charge of academic and international affairs “These two new multi-skill specializations (entrepreneurship and health, management and engineering) and professionalization meet and anticipate perfectly the requirements of the professions of tomorrow. The APIL specialization, Advanced Master Program in Life Sciences and Health Management, was set up in partnership with Institut Pasteur. It is aimed at students with an interest for innovation, business development and entrepreneurship dedicated to life sciences and health. This program will be co-directed by professors Dominique Franco, director of digital education at Institut Pasteur and vice-president of IFBF, and Frédéric Jallat at ESCP.

In its October 2021 issue, the medicine sciences journal publishes an article some of the authors of which are members of IFBF.

"Hepatic organoids - What are the stakes?" is interested in these 3-dimensional structures integrating one or more cellular types that mimic the functions of the liver. Their applications are numerous: study of the liver development, mass production for transplantation or the development of bioartificial livers, modeling of pathologies and high throughput screening of drugs, toxicity studies. The economic and ethical issues of their future therapeutic use are important.

The article (in French) can be downloaded here.

The next annual meeting of the French Society for Stem Cell Research (FSSCR) will be held on the 9th and 10th of November 2021 in Montpellier.

The agenda of this two-day meeting is here.

A Paris-New York airliner is an exact replica of another Paris-New York airliner - including passengers - which landed more than four months ago. Among the three hypotheses put forward by Adrian and his team of scientists, there is bioprinting. “We 3D print biological material. "(L'Anomalie)

A Net tycoon is driven by a crazy ambition: to find a cure for death. To this end he brings together the best specialists. “The idea is to take your liver out and replace it with the same, exactly the same one, created from your own stem cells. No risk, no problem. In a day, it's folded." He said to one of his guinea pigs. (L'Invention des corps)

In two recently award-winning novels, one the 2020 Prix Goncourt, the other one the 2017 Prix de Flore, literature grasps the theme of biofabrication. Biofabrication is an anecdotal reality of our technological society in L’Anomalie, but forces us to rethink the relationship to the body in L’Invention des corps.

Clément Duclos-Vallée, a student at the Ecole Normale Supérieure - Lettres, gives us an account of his reading of these two books in his article "Biofabrication, fabriquer la vie", which can be downloaded here.

After drawing the attention of the European Commission, GoLiver Therapeutics, a member of IFBF (see our news post as of December 6) attracted that of the French State which granted it an stimulus plan aid of 1 million €uros. The young company founded in 2017 will be able to establish a capacity for the bioproduction of clinical batches of its injectable solution of liver cells manufactured in vitro from pluripotent stem cells and consider a phase trial with the Centre Hépato-Biliaire of the Paul-Brousse hospital, another member of IFBF, the leading European liver transplant center.

This aid rewards the efforts of GoLiver but also those of the partners of the iLite University Hospital Research Project dedicated to regenerative liver medicine, which GoLiver actively participates in.

You can read this article from Les Echos here and the company's press release by clicking on the image below.

Launched at the initiative of IFBF in 2017, the fifth course session "Tissue and organ bioengineering" of the doctoral school "Therapeutic innovation - from the fundamental to the applied" of Paris-Saclay University will be held on the 7th, 8th and 9th of next April as a webinar.

Experts from many health, education and research institutions,

• both French (AP-HP, Ecole Polytechnique, IFBF, Inserm, Institut Pasteur, Institut Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, Institut de la Vision, IRBA, Sup'Biotech, UTC),
• and foreign (Health Sciences Institute in Aragon, University of Tokyo) 

as well as from a company (Sanofi),

will present the many specialties contributing to the new discipline of biofabrication:

• cell and organoid culture,
• matrices and "scaffolds",
• bio-printing,
• organs-on-a-chip,
• bio-artificial extracorporeal systems,
• regulatory, economic and ethical aspects.

Please read the detailed program here.

Registration is free but compulsary, please click on the image below.

The issue of Nature dated 11^th of February discusses the findings on a “Neanderthal-like mini-brain’ as published by Science on the same day.

Researchers started by altering the genome of human pluripotent stem cells and swapping the human NOVA1 gene for its Neanderthal and Denisovian variant. Then, they cultured the stem cells into cerebral organoids.

These organoids differ from human ones, in size, shape, texture and activity. It may be that humans have benefited from the change of a single base of NOVA1 for yet unknown advantages.

You can download the Nature article or visit the Nature and Science sites.

credit: Natural History Museum London

Leap^W, launched by the Wellcome Trust, received 300 m$ in May 2020 as initial funding. Its purpose is to finance programs that aim to deliver breakthroughs in human health over 5 - 10 years positioning itself at the intersection of basic science and application. 

Wellcome Leap^W kicked off its funding with the $50M HOPE (Human Organs, Physiology and Engineering) program aiming at bioengineering a multiorgan platform that recreates human immunological responses and demonstrating the advances necessary to restore organ functions using cultivated organs or biological/synthetic hybrid systems that would result in a doubling of the 5-year survival rate of patients and point to a fully transplantable, non-rejected, human organ within 10 years.

HOPE recently announced the selected researchers of which Ludovic Vallier from the University of Cambridge, one of the international experts in organoids and more particularly hepatic organoids (see our post dated January 18, 2021). Congratulations to Ludovic and all his colleagues.

More information on HOPE by clicking on the image below:

Evotec SE, a company specializing in the discovery of new drugs, particularly by high throughput screening, and the Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE) have announced a multi-year collaboration aimed at the development of tissue therapy for the treatment of heart failure.

Evotec will leverage its biobank of induced pluripotent cells, some genetically modified, and their differentiation into cardiomyocytes and UKE will use its proprietary implantable cardiac tissue biofabrication technology.

Evotec's press release is available by clicking on the company logo below.

Osteoporosis is the leading cause of bone fractures in all regions of the European Union. The economic and societal burden of bone fractures is enormous and could be reduced by implementing affordable and curative healthcare solutions that ensure faster recovery with lower healthcare costs.

The emerging field of regenerative medicine offers potential solutions: 3D scaffolds created through an innovative technology called electrospinning promise to support the regeneration of skeletal bone and replace the need for tissue donors, repeated operations or drugs in progress.

The objective of the BONE research project is to accelerate the valorization of profitable 3D implants manufactured by electrospinning in collaboration between 4 research institutes, 4 business support organizations and 5 industrial organizations.

Medicen Paris Region, founding member of the IFBF, is a partner in this project.

Watch a video presentation of BONE by clicking on the image below:

On the 26th of January, Cellenion, a member of IFBF, will present its solutions for single-cell analyses of 3D cellular models. In this webinar, the company will present results from a comparative transcriptomic study of HepaRG cells grown in traditional 2D monolayer versus 3D spheroids.

This study, part of the iLite project, demonstrates the power of single-cell analyses and confirms that HepaRG cells grown as 3D spheroids show a more hepatic phenotype as compared to cells cultured in a 2D monolayer.

Registration is free but compulsory by clicking on the image below: