Synthesizing vascular trees at speed

Engineering a biologically functional structure from living cells can solve global health challenges by supplying abundant artificial tissues and organs for drug screening, disease modeling, and transplantation (1–4). A vascular system is an essential component for the survival of thick tissues. This tree-like network delivers nutrients to cells, regulates blood pressure, and provides resilient blood flow through a hierarchical structure (5). Designing a micro- to millimeter-scale vascular architecture for a centimeter-scale artificial tissue requires extensive computational resources (6). Consequently, engineered vascular networks often have a simple lattice structure that is easy to fabricate but exhibits nonuniform pressure gradient and flow distribution. On page 1198 of this issue, Sexton et al. (7) report a computational approach that can design a complex vascular tree network at more than 230 times the speed of traditional methods. This enables the design of anatomically realistic vascular networks for organ-scale biofabrication.