Dr. Moo-Yeal Lee, an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering, has received $1.6 million for three years from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases of the National Institutes of Health through the Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center for the project entitled "Modeling Diabetes Using an Integrated Plate System." The total funding of this project is $5.35 million. The major goal of this research project is to develop a tractable, high-throughput, integrated plate system containing human pluripotent stem cell (PSC)-derived liver, pancreas, and intestine organoids to simulate normal and diseased mechanisms involved in inter-organ crosstalk and investigate how hormones, nutrients, and drugs might mediate the reversal of Type 2 diabetes.

Dr. Lee has also received $830,000 from the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences of the National Institutes of Health, through his start-up company, Bioprinting Laboratories, Inc. (PI: Dr. Pranav Joshi) for the project entitled "Pillar and Perfusion Well Plate Platforms for Reproducible Organoid Culture from iPSC".  The main goal of this project is to commercialize patent-pending, pillar/perfusion well platforms (including a 384PillarPlate as well as a 36PillarPlate and a 36PerfusionPlate) and demonstrate reproducible brain organoid culture from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) using his unique miniature 3D bioprinting technology.