Frontier Bio announced a key breakthrough in bioprinting: they’ve successfully 3D printed human lung tissue.
The company’s ambitious mission reads as follows:
“Our mission is to create engineered tissues to replace animal studies and save lives. Imagine a future without animal testing; imagine a future where no one has to wait for organ replacements.”
Tissue printing has always been quite challenging because, as you’d expect, human tissue is not made of a uniform material all the way through like polymer 3D prints. Instead it’s a myriad of different cell types, complex structures and materials.
Complicating the problem even further is that all of this must be not only biosafe during printing, but it must be kept alive with nutrients, temperatures, and other factors throughout the entire process and afterwards.
Frontier Bio has solved the dilemma by employing an unprecedented approach in bioprinting: stem cells. Stem cells are specialized cells that appear early in life and grow into the desired bodily structures. Frontier Bio’s new approach uses their ability to literally build the required structures for their 3D printed lung tissue. They explain:
“Frontier Bio’s lung models are produced from a mixture of cells found in the lung, including stem cells. These are combined with a proprietary blend of biomaterials and then processed using Frontier Bio’s own bioprinting hardware to produce the tissue geometry. Frontier Bio developed methods to induce natural self-assembly processes to drive the cells to organize themselves into the complex microtissue architecture of the distal lung, including bronchioles and alveolar air sacs.”
This isn’t just “lung tissue”, it’s tissue that is structured and acts like actual human lung tissue. It even produces mucous and surfactant just like the real thing.
Why do all this? Does the company intend on 3D printing entire lungs for transplant purposes?
At the moment, that seems to be a “no”, as they are initially focusing on use of the new lung tissue for experimental testing. They explain:
“Animal testing is commonly used in preclinical drug development, but it often fails to accurately represent human biology, leading to high failure rates in human trials. Frontier Bio is developing lab-grown human lung tissue as an alternative, offering a more accurate model for drug development and increasing the likelihood of successful translation to clinical use.”
This should not only increase the effectiveness of lung experiments, but also potentially increase the rate of experimentation if the technology allows for inexpensive production.
Frontier Bio expects researchers to use the new tissue technology to help develop treatments for diseases such as COPD, lung cancer, pulmonary fibrosis and even COVID-19. They say there are over 34M people in the US alone that are affected by these and other lung diseases, so there will be no shortage of uses for the new lung tissue.
This isn’t — yet — human organ 3D printing, but it sure sounds like a key step along the way.
Via Frontier Bio
