BOSTON, MA, SUNNYVALE, CA [October 21, 2026] — Boston Children’s Hospital, Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and NTT Research today announced the launch of THUMPIN' (Tissue-engineered Hearts Using Multimodal Printing in Newborns), a Boston Children’s-led research consortium, supported by an up to five-year, and up to $29.6 million contract from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) and other funders. THUMPIN' aims to bioengineer living cardiac tissues and components, with the ultimate goal of bringing those components together into a complete, functioning heart for infants and young children with congenital heart disease.
The initiative is designed to address one of the most pressing challenges in pediatric heart care: providing lasting treatment options for complex congenital heart defects.
“THUMPIN’ brings together a team of clinicians and researchers to rethink what is possible in pediatric heart care: living hearts and heart parts that grow, function, and adapt throughout childhood,” said Dr. Kit Parker, principal investigator for THUMPIN’. “It is an ambitious challenge, but the scale and importance of the problem demand that level of ambition.”
Led by Parker, a Senior Scientist at Boston Children’s Hospital, the Tarr Family Professor of Bioengineering and Applied Physics at SEAS and Director of the DesignBio Group at SEAS, the consortium brings together experts in pediatric cardiac surgery, tissue engineering, stem cell biology, additive manufacturing, and computational modeling.
Over the five-year project, the THUMPIN' team will develop and test the cells, tissues, manufacturing methods, and computational tools required to engineer living cardiac structures, including heart valves, vascular grafts, myocardial patches, components of the conduction system, single ventricles, and ultimately a whole heart. The project will progress from laboratory testing to studies of bioengineered heart tissues in large-animal models, while establishing the manufacturing, safety, and regulatory foundation needed to move the technology toward future human studies.
“Infants and young children with the most severe congenital heart defects may undergo surgery after surgery as they grow, and some ultimately exhaust the options we have available,” said Dr. Pedro del Nido, chair of the Department of Cardiac Surgery at Boston Children’s Hospital and a THUMPIN' investigator who will lead the program’s implantation studies. “The possibility of creating living heart tissue that can grow with an infant could fundamentally change that trajectory. Our job through this program is to determine whether we can make that vision safe, functional, and ultimately translatable to patients.”
Joining Parker and del Nido in this effort are William Pu, MD; Juan Melero-Martin, PhD; Vassilios J. Bezzerides, MD, PhD, of Boston Children’s Hospital; Elena Aikawa, MD, PhD, of Brigham and Women’s Hospital; and Joe Alexander, MD, PhD, FACC, of NTT Research.
The consortium will establish the manufacturing, testing, and regulatory foundation needed to advance these technologies toward an eventual U.S. Food and Drug Administration Investigational Device Exemption, bringing first-in-human clinical studies closer to reality.
Manufacturing efforts will be led in partnership with Landmark Bio, a public-private company co-founded by Harvard University, MIT, and industry partners, with Boston Children’s Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital as collaborating institutions.
“NTT Research is honored to contribute to this groundbreaking effort,” said Dr. Joe Alexander, director of the NTT Research BioMedical Engineering Innovation (MEI) Lab (formerly the NTT Research Medical and Health Informatics Lab). “Our mission is to build computational models that help physicians better understand and treat cardiovascular disease. Through THUMPIN', we’re applying those capabilities to help create a future where infants and young children with congenital heart defects may receive living heart replacements that can grow and adapt throughout their lives.”
“This project challenges us to move beyond repairing damaged cardiac structures and toward engineering living replacement tissues from the ground up,” said Dr. Elena Aikawa, an investigator with the Mass General Brigham Heart and Vascular Institute. “The convergence of biofabrication, regenerative medicine, and computational approaches creates a unique opportunity to develop solutions that have long been considered out of reach.”
“It is not enough to just build the heart. We must build the clinical and industrial capacity to support the THUMPIN’ deliverables as therapeutic options for the patient. We are co-developing the plan for those efforts along with the heart. It’s the only way to make the effort something more than a party trick,” said Parker.
THUMPIN’ is part of the ARPA-H Personalized Regenerative Immunocompetent Nanotechnology Tissue ( PRINT ) program led by Program Manager Ryan Spitler, Ph.D.
About Boston Children’s Hospital
Boston Children’s Hospital is ranked among the best children’s hospitals in the nation by U.S. News & World Report and is a pediatric teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School . Home to the world’s largest research enterprise based at a pediatric medical center, Boston Children’s has led the way in life-changing pediatric innovation since its founding in 1869. Today, 3,000 researchers and scientific staff, including 15 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 37 members of the National Academy of Medicine, and 13 Howard Hughes Medical Investigators, across about 1 million square feet of lab space comprise the research community. From bench to bedside, scientists work on preventing, treating, and curing diseases that impact both children and adults, no matter how rare or complex the condition. Founded as a 20-bed hospital for children, Boston Children’s is now a 491-bed comprehensive center for pediatric and adolescent health care.
With nine satellite locations and the Martha Eliot Health Center , Boston Children’s also provides 24/7 pediatric care at five hospitals, including Beverly Hospital, Winchester Hospital, St. Luke’s Hospital, South Shore Hospital, and Cape Cod Hospital. Boston Children’s also includes:
● Affiliation with Franciscan Children’s Hospital , including 112 beds and more than 700 employees
● Boston Children’s Primary Care Alliance , a robust network of 33 pediatric practices serving patients and families throughout Massachusetts
● The Pediatric Physicians’ Organization at Boston Children’s Hospital (PPOC) with more than 400 physicians, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants devoted exclusively to pediatric primary care, in close collaboration with subspecialists at Boston Children’s in more than 90 locations throughout Massachusetts
● Boston Children’s Health Physicians (BCHP) , which is the largest pediatric multispecialty group in New York's Metropolitan Area, the Hudson Valley, and Connecticut, including nearly 300 clinicians in more than 60 locations.
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About Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) serves as the connector and integrator of Harvard’s teaching and research efforts in engineering, applied sciences, and technology. Through collaboration with researchers from all parts of Harvard, other universities, and corporate and foundational partners, we bring discovery and innovation directly to bear on improving human life and society. For more information, visit http://seas.harvard.edu.
About Mass General Brigham
Mass General Brigham is an integrated academic health care system, uniting great minds to solve the hardest problems in medicine for our communities and the world. Mass General Brigham connects a full continuum of care across a system of academic medical centers, community and specialty hospitals, a health insurance plan, physician networks, community health centers, home care, and long-term care services. Mass General Brigham is a nonprofit organization committed to patient care, research, teaching, and service to the community. In addition, Mass General Brigham is one of the nation’s leading biomedical research organizations with several Harvard Medical School teaching hospitals. For more information, please visit massgeneralbrigham.org.
About NTT Research
NTT Research is the Silicon Valley research arm of NTT, one of the world’s largest technology and business solutions providers. Founded in 2019, NTT Research invents the future of foundational science while accelerating its real-world impact across NTT’s global ecosystem.
From its headquarters in Sunnyvale, California, NTT Research brings together world-class scientists across four research pillars: the Physics & Informatics (PHI) Lab , the Cryptography & Information Security (CIS) Lab , the Medical & Health Informatics (MEI) Lab and the Physics of Artificial Intelligence (PAI) Lab . Their work advances fields that define the next era of optical computing, photonics, next-generation cryptography, bio-digital twins for precision medicine and the physics of AI to understand how intelligence works.
As part of NTT, Inc., a global enterprise with more than $90 billion in annual revenue, serving 75% of the Fortune Global 100 and investing billions of dollars annually in research and development, NTT Research is uniquely positioned to carry deep science from the laboratory to global-scale deployment.
Through the annual NTT Research Upgrade 27 conference and its technology incubator, Scale Academy, NTT Research accelerates the path from discovery to application, transforming fundamental research into technologies that solve real-world problems across industries.