First Of Its Kind: 3D Bio-printed Organ Breathes Fresh Air

First Of Its Kind: 3D Bio-printed Organ Breathes Fresh Air

A Eureka moment for all Bioengineers indeed! A team of scientists has overcome a major obstacle on 3D printing replacement organisms by searching for a breakthrough technology for bioprinting tissues. 

Innovation makes it possible for scientists to create entangled vascular networks that mimic the natural route for air, blood, lymph and other essential fluids of the human body.

This work was directed by Bioengineers - Jordan Miller of Rice University, Kelly Stevens of the University of Washington along with Rice, UW, University of Duke, Rowan University and Nervous System, a design firm in Summerville, Massachusetts. 15 other affiliates.

According to Miller, Assistant Professor of Bioengineering in Rice Brown School of Engineering - One of the biggest obstacles to creating functional tissue replacement is the inability of complex vascular in 3D print that can nurture densely populated tissues. 

The technology discovered is one of the first techniques that address the challenge of immediate and completely multi-vascularization.

Professor Stevens, assistant professor of bioengineering at UW College of Engineering, said that tissue engineering has struggled for one generation.

 This is an important matter, because how a bioprinted tissue works, how effective it will be as a therapy.

On the basis of demand for organ transplantation, the aim is to bioprene healthy, functional organs. More than 100,000 people are in the transplant waiting list alone in the United States and those who eventually receive donor organ, they face the life of immune-medicines to prevent organ rejection. 

In the past decade, bioprinting has brought intense interest because it can deal with both issues by enabling doctors to print replacement organs from a person's own cells. A ready supply of functional organs can be deployed to treat millions of patients all over the world.

"The liver is particularly interesting because it performs 500 different unique roles, possibly only the second for the brain," said Stevens. "The sophistication of the liver means that there is currently no machine or medicine that can change all its abilities if it fails. Bioprinted human organ can supply that treatment someday."

In order to deal with this challenge, the group created a new open-source imprinting technique known as "Stereolithography Equipment for Tissue Engineering" or SLATE. The system employs the manufacturing of hydrogels to create a one-layer layer at a time.

Layers are printed with a liquid pre-hydrogel solution which becomes solid when exposed to light. With each layer, an overhead arm enhances the gel to highlight the liquid in the next image.

The information provided by Rice graduate student and chief co-author of this study, Bjagritt and Miller Grigorian, was the inclusion of food colors which absorb light which is blue.

 The solidification is limited to one layer by these photoabsorbers. In this way, soft, water-based gels can be produced by the machine in a few minutes with complex internal architecture.

The tests of the structure that mimic the lungs have shown that blood circulation and vibratory "breathing" was enough to strengthen the tissues, "a tactile intake and outflow of the atmosphere which imitates stress and human breathing frequencies 

The test found that red blood cells can take oxygen because they "breathe" through a system of blood vessels around the air sac. Area flowed. Oxygen also occurs in the alveolar air-sac lung is like exchanging the circulation gas.

For the analysis of the most complex lung imitative structure, which has been depicted on the cover of science, Miller collaborated with co-author Jessica Rosenkrantz and co-founder of Nervous Systems Jesse Louis-Rosenberg.

In the trials of therapeutic implants for liver disease, team 3D printed cells loaded them with primary liver cells and implanted them into rats. 

The cells had coaches for both liver cells and blood cells and were implanted in rats with chronic liver injury. Tests showed that implantation was alive by liver cells.

Miller said that all the supply information in experiments in printed science research is freely available. In addition, all 3D files required for the construction of stereolithography printing equipment are available, as each Hydrogel used in 32 is for printing design files.

 MHE said that their laboratory is using new layouts and imitation methods to detect more complex structures.

"We are at the beginning of our exploration of the architecture found in the human body," he explained. "We still have a lot to find it."

The co-authors of the study include Ryan's Samantha Paulsen, Daniel Cesar, Alexander Zeta, Paul Greenfield, Nicholas Callafut and Anderson Tao; Daniel Corbett of UW, Chelsea Fortin, and Frederick Johansson; Duke's John Conley with Amanda Randles; And Rowan's Peter Galley