Harald C. Ott is a fellow in cardiothoracic surgery at the Massachusetts General Hospital and an Instructor in Surgery at the Harvard Medical School. He is best known for his work in whole organ regeneration. His background is in surgery (M.D. University Innsbruck in Austria, 2000) and this training has been an asset for his chosen field of scientific research.

Harald Ott discovered and perfected the method of stripping an organ of its own cells and then infusing the remaining scaffold with new progenitor cells (Perfusion Decellularized Matrix: Using Nature’s Platform for Engineering Bioartificial Heart. Nat Med. 2008 Feb;14(2):213-21.). His technology has been successfully applied to heart, liver, lung, kidney, and pancreas regeneration. This method of reseeding and engraftment with native cells potentially eliminates donor organ shortage and the need for life-long immunosuppression in transplant patients, and thus lays the path for effective solutions for the millions of people in need of organ repair or replacement.

The Ott lab further develops perfusion decellularized scaffolds as a platform for organ engineering by developing conditions suitable for human organs, deriving adult cell populations from patients, designing human size bioreactor systems, and developing human organ culture conditions.