Research Areas

The lack of sufficient numbers of donor organs for human transplantation therapies results in the loss of tens of thousands of lives and costs hundreds of billions of dollars each year in the U.S. alone. However, the ability to create, de novo, functional organ replacements for treating human pathologies is fundamentally limited by the lack of a comprehensive vascularization strategy for engineered 3D tissues. Miller develops new biomaterials, 3D printing methodologies, and sacrificial casting strategies to enable the rapid fabrication of engineered tissues containing perfusable vascular architectures. Patterned vasculature facilitates capillary sprouting and supports the function of primary parenchymal cells in centimeter-sized constructs. Together these technologies provide a flexible platform for a wide array of specific applications, and may enable the scaling of densely populated tissue constructs to arbitrary size.