Boston Children’s Hospital Launches Consortium to Develop Bioengineered Heart Tissues for Children

Key Points

• The Boston Children’s Hospital-led THUMPIN’ consortium will develop living cardiac tissues and components for infants and young children with congenital heart disease.
• The initiative is supported by a contract of up to five years and up to $29.6 million from ARPA-H and other funders.
• The team plans laboratory testing followed by large-animal studies, alongside manufacturing and regulatory work toward future human studies.

Boston Children’s Hospital, Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and NTT Research announced the launch of THUMPIN’ (Tissue-engineered Hearts Using Multimodal Printing in Newborns), a Boston Children’s-led research consortium developing living cardiac tissues and components for infants and young children with congenital heart disease. The initiative is supported by a contract of up to five years and up to $29.6 million from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) and other funders. Its ultimate goal is to bring those components together into a complete, functioning heart.

“THUMPIN’ brings together a team of clinicians and researchers to rethink what is possible in pediatric heart care: living hearts and heart parts that grow, function, and adapt throughout childhood,” said Dr. Kit Parker, principal investigator for THUMPIN’. “It is an ambitious challenge, but the scale and importance of the problem demand that level of ambition.”

The consortium brings together experts in pediatric cardiac surgery, tissue engineering, stem cell biology, additive manufacturing, and computational modeling.

Over the five-year project, the team will develop and test the cells, tissues, manufacturing methods, and computational tools needed to engineer living cardiac structures, including heart valves, vascular grafts, myocardial patches, conduction-system components, single ventricles, and ultimately a whole heart. The project will progress from laboratory testing to studies of bioengineered heart tissues in large-animal models.

“Infants and young children with the most severe congenital heart defects may undergo surgery after surgery as they grow, and some ultimately exhaust the options we have available,” said Dr. Pedro del Nido, chair of the Department of Cardiac Surgery at Boston Children’s Hospital and a THUMPIN’ investigator who will lead the program’s implantation studies. “The possibility of creating living heart tissue that can grow with an infant could fundamentally change that trajectory. Our job through this program is to determine whether we can make that vision safe, functional, and ultimately translatable to patients.”

Other investigators include William Pu, MD; Juan Melero-Martin, PhD; and Vassilios J. Bezzerides, MD, PhD, of Boston Children’s Hospital; Elena Aikawa, MD, PhD, of Brigham and Women’s Hospital; and Joe Alexander, MD, PhD, FACC, of NTT Research.

Manufacturing and computational modeling

The consortium will establish the manufacturing, testing, safety, and regulatory foundation needed to advance the technologies toward an eventual FDA Investigational Device Exemption and future human studies.

Manufacturing efforts will be led in partnership with Landmark Bio, a public-private company co-founded by Harvard University, MIT, and industry partners, with Boston Children’s Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital as collaborating institutions.

NTT Research will contribute cardiovascular computational modeling capabilities through its BioMedical Engineering Innovation (MEI) Lab, formerly the Medical and Health Informatics Lab. “Our mission is to build computational models that help physicians better understand and treat cardiovascular disease,” said Alexander, the lab’s director.

“It is not enough to just build the heart. We must build the clinical and industrial capacity to support the THUMPIN’ deliverables as therapeutic options for the patient. We are co-developing the plan for those efforts along with the heart. It’s the only way to make the effort something more than a party trick,” said Parker.

THUMPIN’ is part of the ARPA-H Personalized Regenerative Immunocompetent Nanotechnology Tissue (PRINT) program, led by program manager Ryan Spitler, PhD.s

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