Faculty Accomplishments

Creating the future

Gabor Forgacs organized a research team from seven disciplines to learn how tissue replicates itself. Their research may lead to the ability to create new blood vessels or organs. Forgacs’ endowed position in biological physics supports his research, which has attracted a $5 million grant from the National Science Foundation.

Gabor Forgacs was a theoretical physicist who needed nothing but a piece of paper and a pencil to do his work, he says, until he “saw the light at the end of the tunnel.” He traded pencil and paper for a computer and began exploring the realm of biological self-assembly.

He gathered experts from biophysics, developing biology, organic chemistry, bioengineering, computational biology and biological systems to research the cues that tell cells to regenerate.

They started with tubes. “Seventy percent of your body is made of tubes,” Forgacs says. “We can create tubes in a laboratory, but the key is vascularization — how the tubes or vessels get blood.”

“We probably will never learn exactly how biological self-assembly works, but we will not need to,” Forgacs says. “What we want to know is how to control self-assembly and be able to mimic what the biological system does. Once we understand the fundamental organizing principles that control this self-assembly and the cues that are necessary to provide to the system, we can use that knowledge in our organ printing technology.”

“Transplantation as we know it today is not the future; artificial substitutes are not the future; this is the future,” Forgacs says.

The interdisciplinary team’s research attracted the attention of the National Science Foundation, which is supporting it with $1 million a year for five years. Forgacs is the George H. Vineyard Professor of Theoretical and Biological Physics. The endowed professorship and MU’s commitment to develop a biophysics department attracted Forgacs here from Clarkson University in Potsdam, N.Y.