EU project grows living bone, fat and muscle with a new bioprinting method

An EU-funded research team has developed a 3D bioprinting technique that grows living bone, fat and muscle tissue in the lab, with uses stretching from leukaemia research to cultivated meat.

The work comes out of PRISM-LT, a five-year project running until 2027 and coordinated scientifically by Massimo Vassalli, professor of bioengineering at the University of Glasgow. Rather than extruding a continuous stream of cells, the platform assembles tissue from tiny capsules, each carrying living cells, a gel scaffold, and genetically engineered microbes that steer how the cells develop.

That building-block method is the project’s core bet, and its answer to the central problem of the field: how to print living cells into complex shapes without killing them or losing control of what they become