Veni grant for Paulina Núñez Bernal to build a liver model closer to human biology

Before a new medicine reaches patients, researchers need to understand how it affects the human body. But current laboratory models cannot always capture the full complexity of human organs. This makes it challenging to predict whether a medicine will be safe and effective.

Dr. Paulina Núñez Bernal aims to help change this. She has been awarded a prestigious Veni grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO) for her innovative research on 3D-printed liver models. 

The Veni grant supports outstanding early-career researchers with bold and innovative ideas. The €320,000 award will enable Paulina to further develop her research at the Regenerative Medicine Center Utrecht (RMCU), where she works together with Riccardo Levato. “I will build 3D-printed liver models that mimic human livers to better predict how medicines affect the liver before they reach patients,” says Paulina. 

About the project

BiLIVR: Developmentally Instructive Biofabrication to Program Multicellular Transport Pathways in the Human Liver

Many new medicines fail or cause serious side effects because current laboratory models cannot fully mimic how human organs work. The liver is especially important in drug safety testing, because it processes medicines and helps remove waste products from the body. One key process is the production and transport of bile, a fluid that supports detoxification and digestion and depends on close cooperation between different liver cell types.

Paulina Núñez Bernal will develop a new way to build human liver tissue using advanced 3D bioprinting. Instead of only printing cells into a predefined shape, she will introduce biological instructions into printed biomaterials. In the body, tissues are not formed by simply placing cells in the right position; cells are constantly guided by signals from their surroundings. BiLIVR aims to bring this layer of dynamic, biological instruction into 3D bioprinted liver models, helping them better mimic human tissue function for drug safety testing.

The long-term aim is to create more human-relevant models that help researchers better understand how medicines affect the liver and better predict the toxicity of drugs. This will reduce reliance on animal experiments.