Wake Forest University School of Medicine
Richard H. Dean Biomedical Building
391 Technology Way
Winston-Salem, NC 27101
(336) 713-7293
www.wakehealth.edu
The Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine (WFIRM) is a leader in translating scientific discovery into clinical therapies. Physicians and scientists at WFIRM were the first in the world to engineer laboratory-grown organs that were successfully implanted into humans. Today, this interdisciplinary team is working to engineer more than 30 different replacement tissues and organs for virtually every part of the human body, and to develop healing cell therapies-all with the goal to cure, rather than merely treat, disease. WFIRM laboratories are currently researching ways to create insulin-producing cells, engineer blood vessels for heart bypass surgery and apply regenerative medicine technologies to battlefield injuries through co-leading an $85 million federal grant.
Established: 2004
Director: Anthony Atala, MD
Dr. Anthony Atala is considered one of the world’s leading researchers in the field of regenerative medicine. He was the director of the Laboratory for Tissue Engineering and Cellular Therapies at the Harvard Medical School affiliated Children’s Hospital in Boston when Wake Forest recruited him and his colleagues to created WFIRM. At Wake Forest, Atala developed the first lab-grown organ, a bladder, to ever be implanted in a human. He work in 3D printable organs is renowned worldwide; current work includes implanting bio scaffolding to rebuild muscle tissue in vivo.