Researchers have developed a unique way to use “ice 3D printing” to help produce artificial human organs.
There’s a lot to explain here, so let’s start with the artificial human organs.
In spite of decades of claims and wishful thinking about 3D printing replacement human organs, there have been significant barriers to achieving this goal. While there’s plenty of bioprinting happening, there is a big constraint.
The constraint is that 3D printed cells are alive and therefore require a continuous supply of nutrients and chemicals to survive. In today’s typical bioprinting setups, those nutrients arrive simply by soaking through the bioprinted material. There is no delivery system other than immersion.
In natural tissue there are blood vessels that carry nutrients to and fro, but these are extraordinarily difficult to 3D print. Vessels are highly complex and extremely tiny at times, and that’s just not compatible with today’s bio printers.
That’s where the ice 3D printing comes in.
The researchers were able to 3D print ice structures using plain water. The water would touch a cold surface and freeze, and this would be done layer by layer to form a complete object. They developed a tricky way to do this by having a continuous layer of liquid water on top, allowing the ice for form smoothly in lower layers.
That object would be a structure resembling a blood vessel. Do you see where this is going?
The next step is to embed the ice structure in gelatin, which can be hardened by UV light exposure. Once this is done the ice melts away, leaving an artificial blood vessel.
The researcher then tested the blood vessels by exposing endothelial cells to the structures. They found they could survive for up to two weeks, but they believe this could be done for longer durations.
This technology does not immediately enable the production of artificial human organs, but seems to be an important step along that path. In the future it might be possible to integrate this technology with other forms of bioprinting to produce tissue that includes blood vessels, and that could open up many possibilities.
Via EurekaAlert!
