Printing Life: Fully Biologic Organ-on-Chip Tissues That Could Heal
FRESH 3D bioprinting can now create fully biologic, collagen-based organ-on-chip systems with fine vascular channels, mimicking real human tissue. These constructs support better cell adhesion and remodeling than traditional devices and enable realistic disease models—including pancreatic-like tissue with potential for Type 1 diabetes therapy. Beyond modeling, the platform allows tissues to mature toward implantable function, marking a shift toward printing designs that self-organize into clinically meaningful human tissues, powered by multidisciplinary, team-based science.
Transcript
00:00:08 The exciting thing about the project that we're publishing in Science Advances is that it really demonstrates the ability to use our FRESH 3D bioprinting technology to build these fully biologic tissue systems in the Petri dish. And these are called microfluidic devices or also called organ-on-chip or microphysiologic systems. But they're basically like little models of human tissue. But they've traditionally been made out of silicone rubber or plastic, materials that are not normally in the body. What we can do is make them entirely out of collagen, the major protein of the human body, with all the same structural resolution and fidelity, but now it's fully biologic, which means cells stick to it better; they can remodel it. It really starts to blur the line between what is a bench top in-vitro system that we might use to study disease versus something that we might build as an engineered
00:00:57 tissue to implant in vivo as a therapy and really allow us to interrogate the entire spectrum. The FRESH bioprinting technology that we've developed and refined over the years now has the quality that we can do this and really create little fluidic channels down to about 100 micron diameter for blood flow. We can recreate this complex architecture, and that really allows us to build tissues that mimic different organ types, and really different disease types as well. That allows us to study a lot of different disease mechanisms. And in this paper we actually show that you can build a pancreatic-like tissue that potentially could be used in the future to treat something like Type 1 Diabetes. The impact of this technology is that we can really build these biologic-like tissues that are just more mimetic of what real tissues and organs look like. Obviously that's important for studying how diseases work,
00:01:44 and we're definitely using the platform for that. But the other side is that we can actually build tissues that start out as something small in the Petri dish, but kind of mature or evolve over time into something that we could ultimately implant. What we have today is just an amazing platform for building more complex vascularized tissues. Going forward the question is not "can we build it?," it's actually more of what we build because while we know what the final tissue would want to look like--it's really what's in our own body--it's a little different in terms of what we actually have the printing system create. We need it to kind of adapt or mature into the final tissue design. And so the work we're doing today is really taking this advanced fabrication capability so that we can hopefully better understand what we need to print so that it will ultimately form the tissue that we want either to better mimic the disease of interest or ultimately to have the right function,
00:02:34 so when we implant it, say, in the body as a therapy, it will do exactly what we want. These are complex projects that we're working on that really pull in multiple expertise from biology, engineering, materials science, and computer science, stem cell biology, and so on. I've been fortunate enough to have a remarkable team here at Carnegie Mellon to develop this technology. I think it's important for everyone to understand the importance of team-based science in developing these technologies and the value that these teams bring both to the project and how they move forward in life, then they take these expertise and expand on them in their own careers. That's really foundational to the work we're doing here from the research side, but really, I think, foundational to the educational mission of Carnegie Mellon, the contributions we hopefully make more broadly, and the impact we have on society, both in the work, but also the people.