The Dynamic Duo Of Tissue Engineering

On June 15, Dr. Joseph P. Vacanti spent 15 hours in the operating room at Children's Hospital in Boston, transplanting a liver into a 4-year-old girl who had languished for three years on a waiting list. Vacanti earned a day of rest. But he was up the next morning, evangelizing about tissue engineering at a scientific conference in Boston. In passionate language, he exhorted scientists to redouble research efforts into man-made organs so that 5 or 10 years down the road, patients would no longer die waiting for donoted organs. The intense dedication of Jay Vacanti and his close friend Robert Langer, a prominent chemical engineer, has been the driving force behind many tissue-engineering milestones over the last 10 years. Their lab has produced a huge array of engineered body parts -- cartilage, bone, ureters, intestines, and ears among them. What's more, they ''have seeded the entire country with people doing this work,'' says Dr. Pamela Bassett, president of medical consultants BioTrend in New York.

The two men, both 49, first met in the mid-1970s as researchers in the lab of Dr. Judah M. Folkman, another distinguished scientist at Children's Hospital who is renowned for his discovery some 20 years ago that the cancer cells could be killed by stopping the growth of blood vessels to the tumor. Folkman says the pair stood out from the beginning. ''Langer is a genius. Period,'' he says. Indeed, besides pioneering tissue engineering, Langer was awarded the prestigious Lemelson-MIT Prize, a sort of Nobel prize for chemical engineers, for his groundbreaking work in drug delivery systems. As for Vacanti, Folkman, who has worked with in the operating room, says ''when you have a child with a really difficult problem, he's the surgeon you go to.''