Artificial Tissue Homeostasis

In order to be able to design synthetic organs that function autonomously, we will need to engineer artificial tissue homeostasis. To control the size of these artificial tissues, two major mechanisms will have to be engineered.

The first one is the ability of cells to communicate with each other so they can determine the overall tissue size. Such cell-cell communication will have to be orthogonal to any of the communication systems used in mammalian organisms, in order to prevent crosstalk. The system we are developing is based on the concept of bacterial quorum-sensing, but using mammalian components.

The second mechanism to implement is growth control, to either allow or prevent regeneration or fractional killing to reduce the size of the tissue.