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Building a Better Scaffold for 3D Bioprinting

Posted on November 3rd, 2015 by Dr. Francis Collins

When the heart or another part of the body fails, a transplant is sometimes the only option. Still, the demand for donated organs far outpaces supply, with thousands of people on waiting lists. Furthermore, transplants currently require long term immunosuppression to prevent rejection. Wouldn’t it be even better to create the needed body part from the individual’s own cells? While it may sound too good to be true, research is moving us closer to the day when it may be possible to use 3D printing technology to meet some of this demand, as well as address a variety of other biomedical challenges.

In a study published in the journal Science Advances [1], an NIH-funded team from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, recently modified an off-the-shelf 3D printer to create gel-like scaffolds that could be seeded with living cells to produce coronary arteries, an embryonic heart, and a variety of other tissues and organs.These researchers, of course, aren’t the only ones making progress in the rapidly emerging field of bioprinting. Using more costly, highly specialized 3D printing systems, other groups have crafted customized joints, bones, and splints out of hard, synthetic materials [2], as well as produced tissues and miniature organs by printing and layering sheets of human cells [3]. What distinguishes the new approach is its more affordable printer; its open-source software; and, perhaps most importantly, its ability to print soft, biological scaffolds that set the stage for the creation of custom-made tissues and organs with unprecedented anatomical detail.

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