First You Gotta Have (a 3D-Printed) Heart

Using advanced 3D printing techniques, Mark Skylar-Scott and his team want to transform a paste made of living cells into hearts and other organs. They’re manufacturing thick tissues one layer at a time, placing the exact type of cells needed at the right spots. As promising as it may be, 3D printing with cells comes with some deep and thorny challenges. Watch this video to learn more about the process.

“If we can develop more tissues like this, we might have a decent halfway point to building something that can be implanted in the human body,” says Mark Skylar-Scott  , assistant professor of bioengineering in the schools of Engineering and Medicine.

Transcript

00:00:00 (upbeat music) - Our goal in our lab is to be able to manufacture human tissues at therapeutic scales so really trying to bridge the gap between cells in a dish and human organs in a patient. (upbeat music) My specialty is in 3D bioprinting, the ability to pattern cells and tissues in precise three-dimensional environments. - To create organs and tissues

00:00:30 and different kinds of technologies to help patients that have different kinds of diseases, we're focusing on cardiac diseases and making cardiac tissues, those of the heart. - The ink you're using is not a resin, which will get cured into a solid plastic later on, but actually a soft biocompatible material that contains living cells, and you can directly pattern that ink into a predetermined architecture of your tissue.

00:00:58 - The heart is obviously a hugely important organ. Heart disease is one of the leading causes of death. In fact, is the leading cause of death in the United States. If we wanna aim high and, you know, shoot for the moon and be able to manufacture an organ, heart is a very difficult organ to manufacture. It contains over 10 billion cells over two dozen cell types distributed in complex 3D arrangement to form a functional and beating organ.

00:01:24 We need many orders of magnitude, more cells than practically anyone else in this field to be able to make these tissues. And it's not going to work the first time. We need to practice not once but a thousand times to learn how we write these tissues and keep them alive. So we're really looking at building a pipeline of enabling trillions of cells. Secondly, in order to make tissue at that scale, we're going to need new 3D printing hardware.

00:01:48 So we're working on technologies to be able to manufacture human tissues larger, faster, and at higher resolution. And finally, we are initiating our collaborations with surgical colleagues here at the School of Medicine at Stanford to be able to start learning the needs from their end, how tough does the tissue need to be to be implanted. - I think the possibilities of 3D bioprinting for generating customized patient therapeutics

00:02:15 are truly unlimited. - If we can get all of this work to succeed, then we can address very wide-scale issues in this country and the world. - Surgical processes to manage patients born with structural heart defects are really optimized I think as far as they can really go. We can actually get to the root cause of the problem, manufacture the tissue for the patient, provide them with a normal, happy and healthy,

00:02:45 and duration of life. This is gonna be obviously, an enormous generational challenge, so better get started. (upbeat music)