A 3D printing system, or ‘bioprinter’, created by biomedical engineers at the University of Melbourne, can manufacture structures mimicking the different tissues in the human body including soft brain tissue and harder materials such as cartilage and bone.
Applications: This cutting-edge technology lends cancer researchers an advanced tool to replicate and study the behavior of specific organs and tissues, improving the chances of predicting and developing — new pharmaceutical therapies. This would free more advanced and ethical drug discovery from the need for animal testing. The study was reported in Nature.
“It also drastically speeds up print times and provides the ability to position cells within printed tissues,” said Associate Professor David Collins, head of the Collins Bio Microsystems Laboratory at the University of Melbourne. One major reason 3D bioprinters produce structures that don’t accurately represent human tissue is incorrect cell positioning.
‘Like with a car that needs its mechanical components to be assembled in a certain order for it to work correctly, so do our cells need to be arranged correctly in our tissues.’ Due to these limitations, current 3D bioprinters rely on the natural alignment of cells. On the other hand, our system positions cells inside 3D-printed structures using acoustic waves produced by a vibrating bubble. “The cells get the head start they need to develop into the complex tissues in human beings,” says Professor Galoyan.
Current commercially available 3D bioprinters face several challenges relying on slow layer-by-layer fabrication. The printing can take hours, and the living cells during the printing process may already not be viable. In addition, the cell structures are then printed, and these must be very carefully transferred, albeit a delicate step, onto standard laboratory plates for analysis and imaging.
A sophisticated, optical-based system developed by the University of Melbourne research team has flipped the current process on its head and replaced a layer-by-layer approach.
This new approach uses vibrating bubbles to rapidly and affordably print cellular structures in a few seconds－350 times faster than current methods and lets researchers 3D print human tissues with cellular resolution. The team has dramatically cut the 3D printing time, and printed directly into basic lab plates, which has led to significantly greater cell survival rates without physical handling. Keeping the structures printed intact and sterile during the course.
“The groundbreaking technology already has the medical research sector excited,” said the lead author of this work, Callum Vidler, Ph.D student. But we’ve come up with a technological fix for this gap, with our fast, precise, and consistent solutions. This represents a critical link between laboratory approaches and clinical application. “We’ve generally contacted about 60 researchers from institutions such as Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre and Harvard Medical School, as well as the Sloan Kettering Cancer Centre and the feedback has been extremely positive thus far.”
Reference: Vidler C, Halwes M, Kolesnik K, et al. Dynamic interface printing. Nature. 2024;634(8036):1096-1102. doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08077-6 ‌
