Breakthrough Technique Towards 3D Printing Replacement Organs
Rice University bioengineers have made a big step toward 3D printing replacement organs and tissues, with a new open-source technique for bioprinting tissues that have intricately entangled vascular networks just like the body's natural passageways for blood, air, and other vital fluids. Their proof-of-principle is a hydrogel scale-model of a lung-mimicking air sac. Its airways deliver oxygen to surrounded blood vessels.
Transcript
00:00:17 in this research we're asking what is the structure of human tissue and how does that structure underlie it function here what we're trying to do is figure out how to build living tissues made of soft gels and living cells in the lung we have the airway and its surrounding bloodstream what we are seeing here is that the distension of the airway is actually helping to boost the mixing of
00:00:45 the blood in the vascular architecture that's flowing around the airway this is something that may happen inside of the human lung and it's something that we are exploring more to inform new designs for living tissue one of the challenges in our field is making large tissue blocks that have viable and functional cells and we can make these tissue blocks pretty easily
00:01:07 but the challenge is actually maintaining the viability and functionality of cells inside them what we're really excited about is making scalable tissues that could one day be implanted into humans one of the biggest challenges in making living tissue is figuring out how to get nutrients and oxygen into the tissue and how to get waste products out the way that our body
00:01:28 does this is with vascular networks but in fact it's been very difficult to get blood vessel architectures into soft materials in which cells can live this has been just a big challenge in the field for the past several decades and our lab has been adapting 3d printing technologies for growing soft tissues this project was really facilitated and enabled by open source projects like
00:01:52 RepRap Ultima Sheen and Purusha and we're really excited about the ability to also contribute back to the open source community we believe that sine should be open when you think about your body your lungs your heart and other tissues are constantly in motion and so the fact that we were beginning to explore the 3d printing of these
00:02:12 dynamic structures such as valves or dynamic lung like tissues is incredibly important for the field we are only at the beginning of our exploration of the architectures found in the human body we still have so much more to learn you [Music]