MUNICH (PRWEB) May 04, 2021 The European Patent Office (EPO) announces that Serbian-American scientist Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic has been nominated as a finalist of the European Inventor Award 2021 for her innovative contribution to biomedical engineering. She has dedicated her decades-long career to developing an ex vivo tissue engineering technique which offers a safer, more precise way of cultivating skeletal, heart, lung, and vascular tissue for either transplantation, disease modelling, or drug testing. Named as one of three finalists in the prestigious “Lifetime achievement” category, Vunjak-Novakovic’s work has solved the intricate problems involved in replacing damaged tissue. Before she developed her technique, tissue replacement either involved a painful graft from a patient’s body or carried the risk of immune rejection in the case of grafts taken from a cadaver. Vunjak-Novakovic’s pioneering technique involves creating living biological grafts by growing a new piece of tissue ex vivo from a patient’s own cells, entirely eliminating these problems.