This is a coronary artery structure being 3-D bioprinted. Credit: Carnegie Mellon University College of Engineering
This month >4,000 Americans are on waiting list to receive a heart transplant. Researchers have used a new 3D bioprinting method to bioprint models of hearts, arteries, bones and brains out of biological materials. The work could one day lead to a world in which transplants are no longer necessary to repair damaged organs.
“We’ve been able to take MRI images of coronary arteries and 3D images of embryonic hearts and 3D bioprint them with unprecedented resolution and quality out of very soft materials like collagens, alginates and fibrins,” said Assoc Prof Adam Feinberg
“3-D printing of various materials has been a common trend in tissue engineering in the last decade, but until now, no one had developed a method for assembling common tissue engineering gels like collagen or fibrin,” said TJ Hinton. “The challenge with soft materials — think about something like Jello that we eat — is that they collapse under their own weight when 3-D printed in air,” explained Feinberg. “So we developed a method of printing these soft materials inside a support bath material. Essentially, we print one gel inside of another gel, which allows us to accurately position the soft material as it’s being printed, layer-by-layer.”
One of the major advances of this technique, termed FRESH, or “Freeform Reversible Embedding of Suspended Hydrogels,” is that the support gel can be easily melted away and removed by heating to body temperature, which does not damage the delicate biological molecules or living cells that were bioprinted. As a next step, the group is working towards incorporating real heart cells into these 3-D printed tissue structures, providing a scaffold to help form contractile muscle.
Bioprinting is a growing field, but to date, most 3-D bioprinters have cost over $100,000 and/or require specialized expertise to operate, limiting wider-spread adoption. Feinberg’s group, however, has been able to implement their technique on a range of consumer-level 3-D printers, which cost less than $1,000 by utilizing open-source hardware and software….”we have access to fine-tune the print parameters, optimize what we’re doing and maximize the quality of what we’re printing,” Feinberg said. “It has really enabled us to accelerate development of new materials and innovate in this space. And we are also contributing back by releasing our 3-D printer designs under an open-source license.” http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-10/cmu-cmr101615.php
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zfl_tFdt2D4&feature=youtu.be
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