3D Printing Cartilage for Worn Out Joints

Strands of cow cartilage substitute for ink in a 3D bioprinting process that may one day create cartilage patches for worn out joints, according to a team of Penn State University engineers. Cartilage is a good tissue to target for scale-up bioprinting because it is made up of only one cell type and has no blood vessels within the tissue. It is also a tissue that cannot repair itself. Once cartilage is damaged, it remains damaged. Previous attempts at growing cartilage began with cells embedded in a hydrogel - a substance composed of polymer chains and about 90 percent water - that is used as a scaffold to grow the tissue.

Transcript

00:00:00 standardized way in in printing cartilage as people uh use hydrogels where cells are encapsulated in hydrogels and then hydrogels are printed layer by layer uh and then a pla uh shape can be obtained that can be implanted in in in cartilage one of the problem with the hydrog is cells encapsulated in hydrogels they can't really uh communicate with each other as

00:00:28 hydrogels confine the the cells so the cell to cell communication is very limited when cells are encapsulated in hydrogels in our process we don't really using hydrogels it's completely hydrogel free it's completely scaold free so we confine our cells uh in a very small area uh that the cells uh uh bind together and then they aggregate into mini tissues and then we print these

00:00:57 mini tissues uh and then mini tissues uh can easily self assemble into each other and then make a scale up version of of cartilage tissue bio ink is extruded in the tissue form and then we can make that bio in in any length that we want and then this gives us a really long uh bio in uh that we can stack those bioin uh RS layer by layer and then after Fusion we can easily get a

00:01:25 larger scale tissue