A researcher from Trinity’s School of Engineering and the Trinity Centre for Biomedical Engineering has received a Wellcome Early Career Award for bioengineering research.
Dr Joesphine Wu was awarded €800,000 in funding for her OPTO-BIOPRINTING project, which aims to establish “an entirely new platform for spatiotemporally guided tissue engineering”, to help replacement tissue mimic normal physiological development.
The award, which was announced last Friday, will fund five years of research.
As part of the project, Wu aims to use light to “trigger” cells into producing specific proteins on demand. While Dr Wu will develop a cartilage bone unit as a proof-of-concept, the impact of the project should extend broadly across regenerative medicine.
In a statement Dr Wu said: “I’m immensely grateful for the support of a Wellcome Trust Early Career Award.”
“I’m excited to bring together two powerful technologies for patterning tissue complexity and see where it can take the field of tissue engineering.”
Wu added that previous funding from a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship (ADMIRE COFUND) made the award possible and acknowledged “the continued support from friends, colleagues, mentors, and Trinity’s Research Development Office”.
Trinity’s Dean of Research Sinéad Ryan said: “Organ and tissue transplantation, both live and artificial, can offer improved quality of life for people experiencing a range of medical conditions. Researchers and clinicians are doing crucial work to bridge the gap between the effectiveness of live tissue and its artificial counterparts.”
“Josephine’s project can help narrow that gap, with any leaps forward likely to have positive impacts for many different types of engineered tissues and regenerative therapies”, she added.
Wellcome is a global charitable foundation which provides support for discovery research. The Early Career Award provides funding for emerging researchers in projects that aim to “advance understanding of human life, health and wellbeing”.
