Joseph Vacanti (born October 31, 1948) is an American pediatric surgeon and scientist who leads the Laboratory of Tissue Engineering and Organ Fabrication at Massachusetts General Hospital. He also holds the title of John Homans Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School.

He is one of the key figures in the development of tissue engineering, working with Robert Langer, Eugene Bell, and Yuan-Cheng Fung. His important contributions include co-writing the book Principles of Tissue Engineering with Robert Langer, Robert Lanza, and Anthony Atala. He also helped create the Vacanti mouse in 1997, which was a major breakthrough in the field.

In 2001, Vacanti was chosen to join the National Academy of Medicine. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Creighton University, a master’s degree from Harvard Medical School, and a medical degree from the University of Nebraska Medical Center.

Biography

Vacanti was born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1948. He is the oldest of four brothers, all of whom are scientists: Charles Vacanti, Martin, and Francis. After studying at Creighton University and the University of Nebraska Medical Center, where he earned his medical degree in 1974, Vacanti trained in surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital and Boston Children's Hospital. He also specialized in transplantation at the University of Pittsburgh.

He studied in the lab of cancer biologist Judah Folkman from 1977 to 1979. There, he met Robert Langer, a frequent collaborator. In 2003, he became surgeon-in-chief at Massachusetts General Hospital for Children. From 2019 to 2020, he served as president of the American Pediatric Surgical Association.

Career

A major part of Vacanti's work has been creating new materials and surgical methods for tissue engineering. In 1993, he described tissue engineering as a field that "uses ideas from biology and engineering to make working replacements for damaged tissue."

In 1988, Vacanti created the first biodegradable material structure for transplanting cells. He is best known for helping develop the Vacanti mouse with Charles Vacanti and Linda Griffith from MIT. He has written more than 350 scientific articles.

Vacanti co-founded the journal Tissue Engineering and was the first president of the Tissue Engineering Society, which later became TERMIS. He started this group in 1994 with Charles Vacanti, Joseph Upton from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, Tony Atala from Boston Children's Hospital, Mark Randolph from Massachusetts General Hospital, and Linda Griffith from MIT. In 2017, Vacanti received a lifetime achievement award from TERMIS.

At Massachusetts General Hospital, Vacanti guided or helped guide many important researchers in the field, including David J. Mooney and Antonios Mikos.

Awards

• 1999: Received the Clemson Award for Contributions to Biomaterials Research
• 2001: Elected to the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences
• 2007: Awarded the John Scott Medal
• 2009: Received the Flance-Karl Award from the American Surgical Association
• 2011: Named a Thomson Reuters Citation Laureate in the field of Physiology or Medicine
• 2017: Received the Jacobson Innovation Award from the American College of Surgeons
• 2017: Honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award from TERMIS
• 2021: Received the Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine Lifetime Achievement Award from the Regenerative Medicine Foundation