Boston Children’s Hospital, SEAS, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and NTT Research Announce THUMPIN’ Initiative to Develop Living, Bioengineered Heart Tissues for Children

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

The initiative is designed to address one of the most pressing challenges in pediatric heart care: providing lasting treatment options for complex congenital heart defects. 

“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.”

Led by Parker, a Senior Scientist at Boston Children’s Hospital, the Tarr Family Professor of Bioengineering and Applied Physics at SEAS and Director of the DesignBio Group at SEAS, 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 THUMPIN' team will develop and test the cells, tissues, manufacturing methods, and computational tools required to engineer living cardiac structures, including heart valves, vascular grafts, myocardial patches, components of the conduction system, single ventricles, and ultimately a whole heart. The project will progress from laboratory testing to studies of bioengineered heart tissues in large-animal models, while establishing the manufacturing, safety, and regulatory foundation needed to move the technology toward future human studies.

“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.” 

Joining Parker and del Nido in this effort are William Pu, MD; Juan Melero-Martin, PhD; 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. 

The consortium will establish the manufacturing, testing, and regulatory foundation needed to advance these technologies toward an eventual U.S. Food and Drug Administration Investigational Device Exemption, bringing first-in-human clinical studies closer to reality.

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 is honored to contribute to this groundbreaking effort,” said Dr. Joe Alexander, director of the NTT Research BioMedical Engineering Innovation (MEI) Lab (formerly the NTT Research Medical and Health Informatics Lab). “Our mission is to build computational models that help physicians better understand and treat cardiovascular disease. Through THUMPIN', we’re applying those capabilities to help create a future where infants and young children with congenital heart defects may receive living heart replacements that can grow and adapt throughout their lives.”

“This project challenges us to move beyond repairing damaged cardiac structures and toward engineering living replacement tissues from the ground up,” said Dr. Elena Aikawa, an investigator with the Mass General Brigham Heart and Vascular Institute. “The convergence of biofabrication, regenerative medicine, and computational approaches creates a unique opportunity to develop solutions that have long been considered out of reach.” 

“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, Ph.D.