3D Bioprinting Enables Tissue Engineering

Article preview from Start-Up - June, 2013

3D bioprinting will enable tissue engineering by its ability to create complex human tissues with precision and consistency, and to thereby serve unmet needs in medicine. Two new companies, Organovo and TeVido BioDevices, have staked out medical applications where 3D bioprinting provides advantages.

3D Bioprinting Enables Tissue Engineering

Article preview from Start-Up - June, 2013

The life science industries have historically been slow to borrow industrial automation technologies that create efficiencies in other fields of manufacturing, but that is changing as information technologies, electronics, and factory-floor automation techniques converge on the medical device industry. Three-dimensional printing is a case in point. Used for rapid prototyping in various engineering-based industries (the plastic gun made by a student with a 3D printer has recently been in the headlines) bioprinting has come to medicine, as a tool that enables the custom manufacture of medical devices, reconstructive surgery, and tissue engineering.

3D printing is an outgrowth of the kind of inkjet printer technologies we see at the office, and it involves building up, layer, by layer, a three-dimensional object designed on a CAD program. Just as inkjet printers spray designs onto paper using ink cartridges, these rapid prototyping systems spew out metal, plastic, or ceramics in an additive manner on the precise coordinates of X, Y, and Z axes for precision manufacturing. In the case of bioprinting, “ink” cartridges spit out cells, bone substitutes, or other biocompatible materials in the proper spatial orientation to create a prosthetic ear, recreate a missing chunk of a skull, fill in a battle wound, or, in the ultimate vision for 3D bioprinting, replacement organs. Most of these projects are being conducted at universities, like the Materials Research Group at Washington State University, or the department of biomedical engineering at Cornell University, which, in collaboration with the Weill Cornell Medical College, created a bio-engineered outer ear that looks like a real ear.

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