Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine

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WFIRM is a research institute affiliated with Wake Forest School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Its goal is to use regenerative medicine to repair or replace diseased tissues and organs. Researchers are working on insulin-producing cells, engineered blood vessels for bypass surgery, and regrowing knee cartilage (meniscus). WFIRM leads two federal programs (AFIRM I and AFIRM II) with about $160 million from the U.S. Department of Defense to help heal battlefield injuries. The institute aims to develop more than 40 organs and tissues in the lab. Anthony Atala, M.D., directs WFIRM, which sits in the Wake Forest Innovation Quarter in downtown Winston-Salem. He joined in 2004 and brought teammates from Boston’s Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Notable achievements include the first lab-grown organ, the urinary bladder, implanted in a person, and the discovery of amniotic fluid stem cells that can turn into many tissue types with fewer ethical concerns. They helped pioneer bioprinting, starting with a modified inkjet printer to place cells and later developing the Integrated Tissue-Organ Printer (ITOP). In 2019, a five-year BARDA grant supported lung-on-a-chip research to model how chlorine gas exposure affects the body.