Scientists have grown liver tissue capable of functioning for 30 days in the lab as part of NASA’s Vascular Tissue Challenge. In 2016 NASA put forth this competition to find teams that could ‘create thick, vascularised human organ tissue in an in-vitro environment to advance research and benefit medicine on long-duration missions and on Earth’. On 9 June the agency announced two winners of the challenge.
The teams, both made up of scientists from the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine (WFIRM) in North Carolina, won first and second place in the competition with different approaches to creating lab-grown human liver tissue.