Engineering haematopoietic microniches: the hematon project

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Blood is produced in bone marrow. Within bone marrow small clumps of cells have been found, called hematons, which are able to produce all the types of cells found in blood. It is not known how a hematon is able to do this, and the aim of the project is to find out how it does. To do this, we will try to make hematons outside the body. Because we do it outside the body, we can exactly control the composition of the hematon, in terms of the different cell types it consists of as well as the material that is found outside the cells. In addition, we can also precisely control the position of the different cells by guiding them to specific positions within a reconstructed hematon.