3D Printed Organs? Yes, Possible! - Say Carnegie Mellon Biomedical Engineers

3D bio-printing has the power to have a transformational effect on society, especially now as the latest advances point at creating actual human body organs! Yes. A team of researchers from biomedical engineering department at Carnegie Mellon University have hacked a normal 3D printer to rebuild a human heart. It so happens that the researchers came across some statistics which say more than 4000 citizens in the U.S. are kept waiting for receiving a heart transplant to live a healthier life. The team at CMU took to their heart to build a technique that would one day make transplants no longer necessary for repairing damaged organs.

3d-bio-printing-organ-biomedical-engineers

The lead researcher - Adam Feinberg, who hails from the Materials Science and Engineering & Biomedical Engineering unit at CMU, got together a team to make 3D bioprinting an important tool in various medical applications. The major challenge for the team was that - conventional 3D printers build hard objects made out of metal or plastic. They operate by depositing layers of that material one over the other, in such a way that lower layers give a sturdy support to the layers above them. This 3D printing technique limits the use of soft materials such as gels for making a 3D object.

However difficult the case might be, till date researchers had been successful in 3D printing of various materials required in tissue engineering. In the last 10 years, they could not develop a technique to assemble various tissue engineering gels such as Fibrin or Alginates or Collagen. The reason behind this is that when soft materials are used for 3D printing, they would collapse under their own weight when 3D printed in open air.

The team of biomedical researchers at Carnegie Mellon, therefore, tried a new method where the soft materials are supported inside a bath material. This means that they 3D printed one gel inside another gel on a layer by layer basis. This way, they were able to accurately determine the position of the soft material.

CMU researchers were successful in taking MRI images of various coronary arteries and 3D images of embryonic hearts. They used this data to 3D bio-print the artery and the heart to a very precise never-seen-before resolution.

The researchers note that an important scientific advancement that is a result of their method is called 'FRESH' - short for "Freeform Reversible Embedding of Suspended Hydrogels". It means that the bio-printed delicate biological modules or living cells would not be damaged due to the support gel, because it could be easily melted & removed by heating to body temperature.

The team's efforts are now directed towards embedding real heart cells into these 3D printed tissue structures so that there is a scaffold to help create a contractile muscle. See a video demonstration below -


Another interesting part of this research work is that, traditional 3D bio-printers cost more than a hundred thousand dollars and need special expertise to be operated. This makes wide-spread adoption of this technique a tad too tough. The Carnegie Mellon research group took it as a challenge and made the technique possible using consumer level 3D printers that are priced lower than $1000. Moreover, they made use of open source software and hardware to make it all work.

Using open source material not only brought down the costs, but also let the researchers optimise their methods and increase the printing quality.

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