The National Institutes of Health announced that it will commit as much as $40 million over the next seven years to fund the creation of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute Progenitor Cell Translational Consortium (PCTC), as well as put up $8.2 million for a coordinating center to manage consortium's activities and outreach.

The consortium's goal, the NIH said, is to translate recent advances in progenitor cell biology, including those made by the NHLBI's Progenitor Cell Biology Consortium and the Lung Repair and Regeneration Consortium, to develop new treatments for cardiovascular, pulmonary, and hematologic diseases. 

"The use of patient-specific induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) in combination with bioengineering advances and genome editing offers unique opportunities for developing personalized disease models and tissues for regenerative medicine," the NIH said. "Coupling multiple organ chips together may offer unique opportunities in drug discovery. Advances in 3D printing also offer exciting new opportunities for regenerative medicine, including incorporation of vascular scaffolds into bioengineered tissues and organs."

Projects of particular interest to the NIH include ones focused on continuing development of patient-specific disease models using progenitor cells and genome editing; using natural or genetically modified progenitor cells and their differentiated progeny for cell therapies and tissue engineering; applying endogenous progenitor cells to tissue repair; and reprogramming progenitor cells in vivo to treat disease.