(Press-News.org) HOUSTON – (Feb. 6, 2026) – Rice University bioengineer Antonios Mikos is part of a team of researchers led by the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine awarded up to $24.8 million over five years to help address the nation’s growing organ donor shortage by bioprinting on-demand kidney tissues.
The new funding, from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), will enable the team to produce bioprinted, vascularized kidney tissue that augments renal function in patients suffering from kidney disease. The implantable kidney tissue will be made from a patient’s own cells combined with a bioink that supports the long-term viability of the implanted cells.
“Our key efforts are going to focus on the development of the bioinks, which are 3D printable inks that can host cells,” said Vasiliki Kolliopoulos, a postdoctoral researcher in the Mikos lab who is working on the project. “These are highly complex materials that have to not only be able to mimic the tissue microenvironment but that can also sustain cells over their culture period prior to them being implanted.”
The task will involve developing a library of bioinks that can be adapted to different patients and also vascularizing the 3D-printed constructs to enable their long-term maintenance and function in the body.
The project will draw on the extensive experience in the development of bioinks ⎯ including tissue-mimicking bioinks ⎯ of the Mikos group and will benefit from the resources and infrastructure at the Biomaterials Lab at Rice.
The funding comes from the Personalized Regenerative Immunocompetent Nanotechnology Tissue (PRINT) program at ARPA-H, an agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. PRINT will use state-of-the-art bioprinting technology and a regenerative medicine approach to 3D-print personalized, on-demand human organs that do not require immunosuppressive drugs.
This aims to solve the critical problems of organ shortage and transplantation risks in the United States. There are 120,000 people on waiting lists for an organ, but only 45,000 transplants are performed annually. In addition, transplanted organs last about 15 to 23 years on average and require immunosuppressive drugs for life.
“Just as tissue engineering is considered a convergent science that requires the convergence of many different disciplines, ARPA-H funding mechanisms like PRINT allow for the convergence of different laboratories, different institutions that contribute different expertise needed to address a major health care problem ⎯ in this case, kidney disease,” said Mikos, the Louis Calder Professor of Bioengineering and Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and director of the Biomaterials Lab, the Center for Excellence in Tissue Engineering and the J.W. Cox Laboratory for Biomedical Engineering at Rice.
Mikos said the project builds on a long history of collaboration between researchers at Rice, Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine and the University of Maryland. Other program partners include PrintBio Inc. and the University of Texas at El Paso.
“We’re really excited to take part in such a significant project and to be able to contribute towards the next generation of patient care,” Kolliopoulos said.
The project also includes plans to develop a scalable pathway for the manufacturing and commercialization of personalized bioprinted organs and tissues.
“What we are trying to do with PRINT is extraordinarily hard,” said ARPA-H PRINT program manager Ryan Spitler. “It requires major breakthroughs in cell manufacturing, bioreactor design and 3D-printing technology to reliably build organs that function like the real thing. But if we succeed, we won’t just be giving patients faster access to new organs — we will change the foundation of transplantation itself. The advances from this program could dramatically reduce wait times, eliminate the need for lifelong immunosuppressive drugs and open the door to bioprinted solutions for many other organs in the future.”
The research is supported by ARPA-H under award number D25AC00320-00. The content of this press release is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of ARPA-H.
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This news release can be found online at news.rice.edu.
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About Rice:
Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Texas, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation’s top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of architecture, business, continuing studies, engineering and computing, humanities, music, natural sciences and social sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. Internationally, the university maintains the Rice Global Paris Center, a hub for innovative collaboration, research and inspired teaching located in the heart of Paris. With 4,776 undergraduates and 4,104 graduate students, Rice’s undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is just under 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice is ranked No. 1 for lots of race/class interaction and No. 7 for best-run colleges by the Princeton Review. Rice is also rated as a best value among private universities by the Wall Street Journal and is included on Forbes’ exclusive list of “New Ivies.”
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Rice lab to help develop bioprinted kidneys as part of ARPA-H PRINT program award
2026-02-06
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